


Science and Sorcery

by DrakeTheDuelist



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Science Fiction, Supernatural Elements, Technology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-09-03
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:52:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2219733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrakeTheDuelist/pseuds/DrakeTheDuelist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ages ago, the lycanthropes wracked the Infinity Bridge and decimated the zaangr't population in a conflict later called the Old War.  Now recuperated, the lycanthropes have returned.  With the zaangr't teetering on the edge of extinction, only the voidwalkers can stop them.</p>
<p>A small group of wayward voidwalkers have banded together to fight back against the hordes, each in pursuit of their own agendas, and in so doing they might just stumble onto the strands of fate that bind them all together on a level far beyond the necessity of survival...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Perspectives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two voidwalkers of different skill sets and walks of life collide as the lycanthropes feast around them.

Zaangr’t culture had fascinated and intrigued her for as long as she’d known about them.  In truth, most other cultures of the Infinity Bridge fascinated her, but none quite as much as the one race that could offer some critical answers, not the least of which regarded the sword she wielded.  It kept her safe for more years than she cared to count, and it prolonged the lives of her friends a short but comfortingly meaningful duration, considering all the grand volumes of nothing she knew about the… device?

The weapon took the form of a two-handed broadsword, though it might as well have in her comparatively petite grasp.  The pure silver hilt was engraved with the image of a thorny vine wrapping around it, though aside from this it was a virtual model of geometric perfection, though its uncompromising grip never once cut her hands.  The hilt extended up the blade a short distance, about half as long as its grip, and the hilt parted perpendicular to the blade in both directions.  By its boxy angles and rigid proportions, the hilt seemed to take the form of a crucifix, something each and every one of her friends and allies seemed determined to point out at least once before they died.  On the other hand, she took far more faith in the blade’s killer edge, glowing forever warm as if constantly fresh from whatever mystic forge pounded it out.  Surely, the weapon had some magical properties, though both her control and her knowledge of how to use them were limited.  It shamed her to recall those friends she once protected, only to fail by trusting in the sword’s arcane, capricious power.  At points the sword would move light as a feather and as unstoppable as time itself.  At others it would grow blunt to the touch and heavy in her grasp.  She would colorfully curse the latter occasion, usually stooped over the remains of one or more of her friends whom she failed.

Much like anywhere large societies lived, the Infinity Bridge had its share of refuse, human or otherwise.  Thugs, muggers, murderers, rapists, and low-lives of every stripe prowled the hallowed alabaster corridors of the Infinity Bridge, though these worms were often a civilized, prepared voidwalker’s last concern.  Darker forces hid around every corner, lurking in seemingly every shadow.  Running from them is useless.  Reasoning with them is fruitless.  Anything short of fighting back is utterly pointless.  The… _things_ defied any reasonable definition of sentience, seemingly more composed of living shadow than flesh and blood.  This would not prove entirely true, and though it did take her quite a while to score a fatal wound to the things, they did in fact bleed and die like any other living thing, thank whichever gods were paying attention.

The monsters began attacking like rain.  The first thing you feel is the overwhelming aura of their presence.  You can almost smell them in the air.  Shortly after, the first raindrop falls.  A moment later, not so long after the first as to forget, two more fall.  Then more descend.  Mere moments later, the floodgates are fully released and you wonder how the air could’ve ever felt dry in the first place.  She had nearly forgotten her former life, before the rain, before Redeemer’s gardens ran red with blood.  She was once a simple artisan.  Though she was at the time too humble and shy to admit it, others looked to her as a pillar of her like-talented community.  It long escaped her memory how or even when exactly the monsters began appearing.  They just were, and had become such an integral part of her everyday life that she might almost miss them were they to leave.  But she would never miss them as much as her community- no… her _friends_.

As soon as the blood began to flow, the panicked exodus began.  Voidwalkers furiously outpaced and even trampled other voidwalkers as all sense of camaraderie became replaced with abject terror in the best of people.  How she survived when others didn’t weighed heavily on her heart.  The initial survivors gathered together and searched out other worlds, only to find similar horror stories from other displaced voidwalkers.  Whatever these monsters were, this wasn’t some random raid.  It was an infestation.  And it had to be stopped.

Intrepid voidwalkers, both from her circle of remaining friends and from other communities whispered plans to search the Infinity Bridge for weapons to fight back against the monsters.  Such efforts proved fairly effective when it came to finding weapons, though using them for survival met with mixed results at the best of times.  Forces dwindled, but weapons that hadn’t been used in ages found new, desperate wielders.  Even she herself wound up stumbling upon a weapon, the glowing sword she continued to use to this very day.  Despite wielding such a weapon, and even scoring a few kills of her own on occasion, she still didn’t consider herself much of a fighter.  Hell, even in the present day such a thought rarely crossed her mind.  Compared to some of her friends, she felt inadequate, ashamed to compare herself to those she knew who took up arms with the most natural of ease and could’ve become far better heroes in her shoes than she could’ve ever hoped to become in theirs.  Sierra, Matthias, Myaka, Kahad…  _they_ deserved to make it this far, to fight among the last of their estranged kind.  But who wound up surviving to the end?  A lanky sketch artist with what one might charitably call a penchant for leading from the rear.  There’s some expression about discretion being the better part of valor or some such crap... but it wouldn’t bring them back, so the solace that this proverb provided was hollow at best.

When the last of her friends fell, she knew that she’d spent far too long running and scurrying about.  It was time for action.  Time to make those freaks of un-nature pay for the lives they ended and the worlds they ruined.  Naturally, she knew of no such way… but she knew of some who did.  Before any of this hell started, she remembered a voidwalker who lived in Redeemer for a time, though he was something of a paranoid loner.  To no voidwalker’s surprise he went his own way, but not before leaving behind some stories that rang eerily prophetic in retrospect.

He spoke of a war.  That crazy bastard always spoke of war.  But this was more than just some cautionary tale about the horror of war crimes committed by self-proclaimed freedom fighters, the likes of which she had heard a hundred times over.  No, this was much older, as if from the annals and tenets of an ancient human religion, when historical fact became blurred with hearsay and legend.  One of the factions was an endless horde of demonic creatures, though descriptions were immensely prone to hyperbole.  Something about their numbers being more than all the stars of all the universes combined.  The other race, the presumed good guys of the war, were a scarce but incredibly noble race of beings with superhuman skill and might.  There were some smaller skirmishes mentioned, though she gave such hokey fairy tales little attention at the time.  What she did catch was that the good guys eventually won.

She wouldn’t have given this story a second thought before, but things had changed pretty rapidly after the monsters started attacking.  Apparently, the voidwalker had spread his story pretty far, considering that other survivors whom she had never met before spoke of the accounts as if they had actually happened, repeatedly referring to a mighty race of warriors, half man and half dragon.  She wouldn’t have given such a coincidence a second thought, but hearing what the creatures were presumably called seemed to jog her memory:  zaangr’t.

Could that story of an ancient war be real?  She had yet to meet a zaangr’t in person at this point, but the Infinity Bridge was a pretty big place.  Supposedly, zaangr’t were pretty elusive, having nearly went extinct fighting the monsters the last time they decided to wreck the bridge.  Now _that_ inspired confidence…  Still, if these zaangr’t were in fact real, they were her best hope at survival.  She first remembered the name while some of her friends were still alive.  When the last of them died, it gave her the impetus to pursue this fantasy a little more diligently.  If nothing became of it, she’d be monster chow anyway.  What did she have to lose?

After a while, the zaangr’t became fairly easy to find.  Voidwalkers would report seeing them with greater and greater frequency, and there appeared to be a good number of them.  Nothing compared to the monsters, but she was far beyond any other hope by that point.  Why they suddenly started showing up now puzzled her, but she’d just heap that onto the laundry list of questions she already had for them.  The trick wasn’t really locating the zaangr’t as making it to them without you or them getting killed first.  An unoccupied zaangr’t was nearly impossible to find, but a zaangr’t at work was another story altogether.  When fighting, zaangr’t tended to cluster up near the thickest fighting on the Bridge, right in the heart of danger, meaning that all you usually had to do was find a large horde of the bad monsters and you were bound to stumble on at least one of the good ones.

It took a few attempts, but she finally got to meet a living one.  The spectacle was both like and unlike all she had heard.  Like the monsters they fought, the zaangr’t seemed to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  Their fighting styles were incredibly diverse, though often bordering on flashy and exotic, unlike any style of martial arts that she had seen, wherein the assumed combat invariably pit human against human.  Most interestingly of all was their society.  According to hearsay, the zaangr’t were deeply loyal to lofty ideas, so it seemed she might actually fit in pretty well with these zaangr’t things.  Meeting them in person proved a different story.  They seemed less than forthcoming about identifying themselves, or communicating with her in any verbal way, though considering their status as legendary saviors they probably didn’t give every voidwalker who showed up on their doorstep the grand back story of their race.  They did provide protection, however, as if they were looking for any excuse to kill the bad monsters that drove her to seek their protection in the first place.

The zaangr’t seemed to have a pretty tightly-knit, if not incredibly spaced out command structure, but once you find one it would be easy to locate more through their superiors and subordinates.  Unfortunately, though the average zaangr’t was more than a match for even a horde of the monsters, the higher-ups were neither as knowledgeable nor as friendly as she would’ve hoped.  If any of the zaangr’t knew anything, it would’ve been their priest caste.  As best as she could piece together, they were called… khha-zaan… zay-zaan… zukha…  After a solid hour of failed attempts to learn their phonetics, she figured that it was probably a language only intended to be spoken by those with forked tongues, and so she gave up trying.  The elite warrior castes, fortunately, knew enough human-speak to answer her many, many questions about the monsters that had hounded her and her friends, and of the sword that killed more of the things than she had any business killing were she unarmed.  In fact, the zaangr’t were _very_ interested in her sword… more so than she would’ve wished.

The zaangr’t called the sword Sheol, finally giving name to her favorite ten pounds on the whole Bridge.  The zaangr’ts’ description of it was when things began to get more troubling.  They said it was some kind of lost artifact, held hidden powers, was very valuable to their kind, a potent symbol of their faith, blah blah blah…  And then they demanded that she hand it over and, as they so generously put it, get out of their sight before they decide to withdraw their incredibly generous mercy and patience.  …What the _fuck?!_   Did she miss something at some point?  Did the zaangr’t not care that this sword was her only means of defense against those shadow monsters?  It took her what felt like forever to track down these scaly bastards, and she found them armed to the teeth no less, and they want the one weapon that had been keeping her alive this whole journey?!  To hell with that!  They’ve got enough swords that they won’t miss this one.  She needed a weapon, and they treat that need like she punched out their pope.  They may have had some fascinating culture, traditions and aesthetic tastes, but that didn’t give them the right to be pricks about it…

At any rate, after burning some serious bridges with the zaangr’t leaders, she figured she needed to figure out the answers to this weapon on her own.  But when asked about a magic fire sword called Sheol, most voidwalkers knew only two things:  jack, and shit.  They did figure out about the shadow monsters.  Turns out that some bounty hunters started calling them “lycanthropes” after fighting some long and drawn-out campaigns of extermination against them, wherein they largely took the form of wolves.  She had seen the wolf-genus versions of the beasts in person, and admittedly they did make up the vast majority of the ones she saw.  The name didn’t account for all the other ones that looked like tigers, bears, dragons, and even swarms of insects… but there’s no point in getting anal about it now.  It was somewhat textbook-y, but it stuck as a name, and it would save her the effort of thinking up her own shorthand name to succinctly identify a “big ornery son of a bitch”.

Only the most daring, crazed, and straight-up pissed off voidwalkers dared fight the lycanthropes.  Most smart voidwalkers ran from any sign of them, forming roaming villages of survivors.  These outposts, though the closest thing to normal civilization she’d seen since the days of Redeemer, were like holding back the tide with your bare hands.  She knew this better, more intimately, and more viscerally than those refugees had assumed.  The oddballs and outcasts were little better.  Often traveling alone, usually the last man or woman standing from a similar-looking village of survivors, they usually had massive grudges, and even larger piles of ammo reserves that their fallen compatriots surely wouldn’t be putting to use anytime soon.  She wondered to herself if this would be her fate after long enough.  She wanted to maintain her sanity and common sense, but still… who _else_ was going to make those monsters pay for what they did to her friends, many of whom she owed her life to?  What would it mean for the memories of her friends’ sacrifice to live the rest of her life in some run-down shanty of a village, passively waiting to be picked off?

And so that led her here, to a situation that should really have seen her dead.  She figured the best way to avoid the loonies, voidwalkers and zaangr’t alike was to avoid areas of heavy lycanthrope concentration.  But there’s always at least a few lycanthropes around, until you kill them yourself.  The zaangr’t may have been douchebags, but she picked up a few tricks about how to use Sheol’s otherworldly powers.  She figured she could defend herself, especially against little clusters like this.  This particular pack, numbering five in all, seemed a little more distracted than usual.  Four of them, each about the size of a dump truck, seemed to have cornered the fifth, a veritable runt, but individually imposing nonetheless.  Heh, so they finally decide to resort to cannibalism.  She vaguely thought to turn her back and pretend she didn’t see anything, hoping that at least a few of the lycanthropes would know what it’s like to be torn to shreds by monsters, but that wasn’t good enough for her.  She had to kill them herself.  Let them feel Sheol’s burning sting as it carves them up like common poultry.  Let them know that an unassuming little twig of a voidwalker made them her bitches.

She darted into position behind a white stone pillar.  She had to be close or this wouldn’t work.  Sheol had some pretty flashy bound magic, but it seemed that only zaangr’t could use it for long periods.  If anybody else tried using the weapon, it would stop their heart for the duration of the spell.  It certainly sucked that she couldn’t use some sustained flame attack or powerful heat rays like some of the zaangr’t she had met, but it was hardly a deal-breaker, especially in small skirmishes like this.  A sword only has to be supernaturally sharp for a split second, which went a pretty good way to mitigate Sheol’s potentially killer drawback.

Hearing the lycanthropes snarling violently, she knew that she had little time to make her move before the cannibalistic creatures made theirs.  She felt her chest seize up as her feet carried her forward, into the presence of the lycanthropes.  Though she was moving at the pace of a mere run, the lycanthropes didn’t seem to notice her.  She swung Sheol in a wide, horizontal arc, drawing a flaming trail through the air, right through a lycanthrope as she darted past.  It made no imminent reaction, though she quickly made her way around a different pillar.  Going down to a single knee, she grasped her chest as she drew in a tense breath, her pulse restoring.  Though she gasped loudly, one of the lycanthropes let out a bellowing roar to drown her out, just noticing the pain before flopping to the ground with a colossal thud.  Flash step.  There’s a reason every sword wielder on the bridge seems to use that trick, stepping out of the flow of normal time to deliver a punishing slash without having to stick around for any repercussions.  It brought a gratified smile to her face for a moment to hear the thing die.  One less killer stalking about the Infinity Bridge… though she tried not to dwell on how many billions must’ve remained.  It would’ve spoiled the moment.

The remaining lycanthropes’ loud roars seemed only exacerbated when they noticed one of their number dead.  Meanwhile, her heart beat furiously, seeming to make up for lost time.  She wouldn’t be able to safely make another flash step again for a moment, but she hoped that her trick would disorient the lycanthropes’ heightened senses long enough to make another pass.  She planned on going for the bigger three left, saving the runt for last.  Though even the smallest one stood over a couple times her own height, she figured this would allow her the best shot at decapitating one of the things.  Logistically it made little difference, but cathartically it was a treasure of a moment.  The damned things brought this all on themselves when they invaded Redeemer… when those fuckers took everything… _everyone_ away from her.  She owed it to all her friends to return the favor.

But just then, she was shaken from her thoughts of vengeance as another great thud shook the ground.  Though it was hard to hear past all the animalistic growling, it seemed presaged by a… high-pitched whistle of sorts.  She’d heard other weapons kill lycanthropes before, usually heavy guns with low-pitched hums of laser blasts or dull thuds of bullet-spewing violence, but she’d never heard anything like this.  Perhaps it was some kind of spell.  Rested up, she figured she could check out the area on her next pass, and gut one of the things like a fish while she was out there.  But before she could even take a step, it happened again!  Another whistle streaked past and briefly preceded another quake of an impact.  What the hell was going on out there?  Tensely clutching Sheol’s hilt, she strode into the open again.

As soon as she stepped out, she almost immediately stepped back behind cover, nearly running into one of the creatures’ idling spiked tails.  Navigating around the veritably immobile but deadly obstacle, she noticed two of the creatures turned in the same direction, with the third’s head turned up.  The fourth had sunk down into the ground, a mound of worthless flesh and bone felled by a gruesomely spacious wound across what she presumed to be its lower spine.  She spared a fraction of a moment to praise her own handiwork with a grin, but upon closer scrutiny, there weren’t four living lycanthropes left.  The two that were faced away from her original position were drooping over, their mouths hanging wide open in a silent howl.  The third creature’s neck was jarred off to one side, seemingly frozen in time at the point of impact from some unseen blow.  She couldn’t make out where the runt lycanthrope was, nor was she particularly concerned at the moment.  She dared not move in any closer to investigate, lest she meet a similar fate.  Besides, lest she forget in the shock of it all, her heart had stopped, which she began to notice as her vision began to blur.  Shit!  She released her own pulse as she somersaulted behind the nearest pillar she could see.  Any longer and she would’ve passed out.  In fact, she was barely on the verge of consciousness as she desperately leaned back into her new piece of momentary cover.

As her eyes rolled back into her head, she was shaken awake as the pillar at her back burst apart at the edges in a few places.  The pillar’s extreme edge flicked off bits of stone with a rough crunching sound, accompanied by more of those whistling discharges she had heard before.  She fought the urge to swear aloud in shock as rubble collected around her feet.  The scenario caught her by surprise.  Lycanthropes don’t use guns in her experience.  Hell, _zaangr’t_ didn’t use guns in her experience.  But she also knew from her experience that no human, not even a voidwalker, had ever been able to track her movement while flash stepping.  Mercifully though, after this the assault seemed to fall silent.  She took this precious reprieve to catch her breath, though the air crept into her lungs in stuttering, panicked bursts in her attempts to keep silent.  She fumbled Sheol in her grip, preparing to go out swinging if need be, but the unsettling silence continued its assault.

Part of her dared to hope that playing possum for long enough would elude her attacker, but the approaching crumble of boot steps crushed that hope before she could even latch onto it.  Great.  Whoever or whatever she was hiding from, she managed to piss it off.  This isn’t gonna’ end well-  no!  She immediately closed off any pessimistic thoughts, holding up Sheol.  She had made it this far on the back of a weapon she only recently began to understand.  Her friends laid their lives down to get her this far.  She didn’t make it this far just to get cut down by some coward with a gun.  She was a coward with a _sword!_   Totally different!  She would live to fight another day.  Otherwise, her friends died for nothing.  All during her bold contemplation, the slow, grinding footsteps approached closer and closer.  Her assailant was on the move.  Slowly, but on the move.  He probably thought he drove her off.  No matter.  That idiot was probably trying to make for a more advanced firing position, but as soon as he passed her by, BAM, Sheol right in the back!

The footsteps finally stopped.  She prepared to tap into Sheol’s magic, but she hadn’t rested up enough.  A stunt like that could kill her at this rate, and she owed it to her friends to make every effort to live.  Oh well, a sword is a sword, magic or not.  It might not be on fire, or supernaturally fast, or magically sharp, but it was enough.  If her friends were waiting for her on the other side, they’d have to wait a little bit longer for their reunion…

*-*-*

Reincarnation.  The science behind immortality.  Such a weapon could surely have been put to good use in the war to come, he thought in that moment, simultaneously wondering how he wound up with the corona of a zaangr’t blade pointed at his throat.

He’d never seen a lycanthrope that could talk so coherently before, let alone one that could beg for mercy.  Were it any bigger, he probably would’ve picked it off from a distance with Quicksilver.  Instead, he figured this veritable runt could be taken down closer up.  On closer inspection, the other lycanthropes were attacking it, and he had inadvertently saved the thing’s life.  He knew a voidwalker who might have called this sort of serendipity ‘providence’.  If only Angel could see him now, he sneered to himself.  The lycanthrope’s promise proved little solace to make up for Gigadrakken.  Decades of work, gone in an instant, all because he didn’t think to arm his sentry guns with something more substantial than solid slug ammunition.  Stupid, stupid, stupid… but he’d take what he could get.  Every mercenary has to start somewhere.  Or restart, as the case may be.

Even on the not insignificant chance this was some kind of setup, this was the kind of promise that could tip the war in the voidwalkers’ favor forever, if he felt so charitable as to share it.  Even godlike though voidwalkers are, regenerating a mortal wound can take one of their kind millennia upon millennia.  If one were to understand it better, perhaps that time could be shortened, and dramatically so.  Perhaps, in a future conflict, a standoff like the one he now found himself in could be avoided.  Simply pull the trigger and walk off any mortal wounds that may have been incurred in the process.

The lycanthrope mentioned a zaangr’t mercenary after him.  Go figure, those blazing idiots take no prisoners and immolate any lycanthropes they find.  He had no love for the visceral specters they hunted, but to think of all the ancient magic and technology they’ve seen in their long, brutal lives, all lost to the ages in the quick flicker of an ember.  Perhaps they knew of some weapon similar to Gigadrakken.  Perhaps something better.  Perhaps one might even be an original witness to the creation of the Infinity Bridge itself, a tale so apocryphal that no sane voidwalker ever bothered trying to empirically deduce the origins of the Infinity Bridge.  The taste of such careless annihilation of knowledge didn’t sit well in his mouth.

Worse yet, this particular lycanthrope claimed to have once been human, turned by his attackers.  It would explain the creature’s articulacy, if nothing else.  If lycanthropes can actually turn other creatures into more of their own kind, how are they doing this?  Moreover, how long have they been doing this?  Is this how they reproduce so phenomenally rapidly, despite getting mowed down by the hundreds in countless encounters?  He already had to replace a few of the stocks on Quicksilver after he foolishly tried to keep kill tallies.  Needless to say, this was before he realized how many of the blighted fiends there were, and even longer before learning of how they were likely created.  If there’s even a chance that the lycanthropes’ sorcery could somehow be reversed, their seemingly endless supply of foot soldiers would dwindle exponentially.  It could possibly even exterminate their entire race.

It’s at times like this that he fancied a sniper rifle, a weapon that played to not only his own strengths, but to the task at hand.  Perhaps it wouldn’t suffice for the _imminent_ task, given how he currently found himself trapped in melee, but if he were to die now he’d still stand by his choice.  He knew of other, more bombastic voidwalkers who swore by shotguns, rocket launchers, machine guns, and exotic energy weapons of every imaginable design.  No, the sniper rifle is the kind of weapon that rewards its user for their skill and patience, two things which he had been honing for as long as he can remember.  In defiance of every iota conventional wisdom he’d heard, he believed that it didn’t take a wall of lead to eliminate a target.  Granted, it _would_ work, and even he would have to concede that, but the widespread assumption felt so… fallacious.  One shot, delivered by one sniper, into one particularly critical brain.  The collateral damage would be extremely low, and even lower considering the ionic ammunition Quicksilver was designed to fire, but the damage to morale, seeing one of their own number drop dead from immediately indeterminate causes or sources, would be catastrophic.  Charging in with guns blazing and pouring a torrent of ammunition into a target, though incredibly cathartic, struck him as coming from a mentality that saw strength in numbers.  Ludicrous.  If strength were truly found in numbers, why didn’t the lycanthropes win the Old War?  No, much like with people, firepower isn’t made better by having more of it in the same place and going in the same direction.  (If only he could get Angel to wrap her head around this bit of wisdom, she might actually quit pestering him, but that’s neither here nor there…)

As much as he detested the zaangr’t’s practices, at least _they_ understood this concept.  Thus, it was all the more believable to hear a lycanthrope fear for his life as he was stalked by a solitary assassin employed by the zaangr’t.  Though one would usually be wise to trust a lycanthrope about as far as one could throw it (literally; if you could physically outmatch a lycanthrope, you had largely overcome the creature’s deadliest of weapons), this fit with their tactics.  It also helped the beast’s case that one of the nearby lycanthropes, momentarily staggering on account of their disrupted and misfiring synapses, had been cut apart in a crimson flash, which the runt assumed must’ve been its assassin.  He knew of some zaangr’t who were capable of incredible speed, but only from speculation.  Seeing his purported target actually demonstrate such a feat had all but confirmed those legends and whispers.  And so he drew his rifle… and it led to this.  He had little time to choose a course of action, but the moment would not allow further contemplation.

Rounds cracked around the corridors of baroque architecture of the Infinity Bridge as he sought to suppress this assailant.  He could hunt it properly once he had driven it off from his imminent, somewhat exposed position.  Whoever or whatever designed the Infinity Bridge wasn’t thinking of trading fire across its cathedral-like corridors with no end and a ceiling stretching so high it strained the eyes.  Too many avenues of attack to monitor.  Not good.  Though it wasn’t typical of zaangr’t to employ ranged weapons, he hadn’t survived through all the hell he had been through by making stupid assumptions.  He immediately took cover behind a pillar, an intersection between two stone, vertical platforms forming a cross from overhead.  Such a crevice would drastically limit the perspective of an attacker, if only long enough to allow him to catch his breath.  He peeked Quicksilver’s barrel around the corner before leaning half his torso around the edge, concealing as much of his exposure as possible behind Quicksilver’s long stock.

A flash of lateral movement crossed the targeting reticule.  The aim flew wide as he attempted to follow the direction, depressing the trigger out of sheer nervous reflex.  “RED 249 / GREEN 198 / BLUE 2,” Quicksilver’s targeting HUD projected upon the lens of the scope.  It may not have been able to pick out any solid shapes, but the micro-supercomputer did its best.  Adrenaline pumped as his thunderous heartbeat threatened to throw off his aim.  In retrospect, those metabolic auto-injectors implanted along his spine tended to have this effect every time they went live.  He maligned this side-effect every time he took steady aim, but the focus it gave him was incredible.  Without augmentation, the human eye probably would’ve missed any notions of movement, leaving him blind without Quicksilver’s sophisticated scope.

A brief moment passed, but the blurred assailant continued to elude his sights.  He lifted his human gaze from the scope, keeping Quicksilver raised, but sensed nothing.  Keeping the rifle braced to his shoulder, he manually aimed the rifle’s barrel at another pillar across from him.  As he returned to his targeting reticule, he flicked a switch along the body of the rifle.  Though he couldn’t see where his attacker went, he knew of some of the zaangr’ts’ limitations, and he had been saving such a trick for the right occasion.  Upon looking through the scope, he saw a faint wash of bright green bleeding through an otherwise night blue background.

He had prepared a number of one-use-only contingencies for getting out of particularly difficult situations.  This particular contingency was reserved for a zaangr’t, as he considered arming himself against all sorts of races on the Infinity Bridge something of an occupational insurance.  However, he could never think of an opportune time to use such a contingency.  Zaangr’t have a habit of ferociously guarding their dead and have a vengeful streak like nothing he’d seen from any other mortal creature.  These two factors generally made fleeing from the dragonoids a wiser choice of action than actually facing one.  But no, this one hunted alone, and its attacks were, for once, seemingly unprovoked.  Not like a zaangr’t, he thought.  The lycanthrope briefly deduced that it was a zaangr’t-employed assassin, though he reckoned that any professional killer up to the exceedingly high standards of the zaangr’t would display a bit more discipline than this.  Lycanthropes had recently been cut apart, albeit after he had shot them.  As their foul ichor flows free from gaping wounds, staining the air with its bestial filth, he found a harmonious, satisfying answer to these discrepancies through Quicksilver’s scope.

The infrared heat signature was small and limited, whisked about by the movement of the air, but a bright yellow trail persisted.  He lifted Quicksilver from the pillar and raised his gaze as he stared towards another of the ornamental columns, slowly advancing towards it.  This was no zaangr’t assailant.  It was, however, using one of the zaangr’t weapons, which radiated its own body heat just as they do.  The rest of the heat signature…

…Human.  Hmm, quaint.  How such an individual acquired a zaangr’t weapon was the least of his questions at the moment.  He hadn’t hunted a humanoid in centuries.  The bounty from the last one, some crazed serial killer from what he barely recalled as a mundane backwater, yielded veritable pocket change, simply enough to satiate his appetite and little more.  It was a chore, and scarcely worth particular remembrance.  It hadn’t been the first task of such a kind, and it seemed it wouldn’t be the last.  More recently, the highly lucrative field of lycanthrope hunting had taken his fancy in recent times.  Sorrowful, vengeful, incapable and wealthy souls seemed readily available, ready to slake their thirst for vindication at any price.  Their grief overtook their frugality, as well as any logical sense.  Did they really think such a gesture would actually harm the lycanthropes as a species?  But he never saw point in mentioning this to his clients.  That funding put him through energy weapons for several decades, especially after the night of the ambush left him with little more than the clothes on his back and the rifle biting into his shoulder.  No matter.  So long as long as sorrow and vengeance burned hot, he would climb that proverbial mountain again, one trigger-squeeze at a time.

He raised Quicksilver’s aim perpendicular to the ground as he silently prowled towards a pillar, past which the infrared trail terminated.  With Quicksilver about as long as he is tall, it threatened to give away his ambush as he approached.  Feeling the rifle casing, he fingered at a charge pack jammed underneath the casing, sparing not a glance at it as he deftly proceeded.  Quicksilver’s ammunition would hold out, but his window of opportunity would not.  He would have one chance to make one shot, but if the assailant was truly carrying a zaangr’t weapon, there would be little chance for a follow-up at such a range.  It was a risky ploy, but one that paid for itself many times in the past, though admittedly against lesser-armed targets.  Traditionally, one would use covering fire to approach hastily on the position amidst the commotion to make the kill shot.  Operating as a one-man fire team, he instead erred to stealth, catching his target by surprise.  They never saw it coming.  Ever.

He let out an extended, calming, silent exhale as he prepares.  Stealth would be abandoned in moments, and his job would be over.  He shut aside thoughts of being sliced to ribbons like the lycanthropes around him, instead focusing on his tactical edge, a supremacy he hadn’t let out of his grasp in millennia.  Just swerve around and pull the trigger.  Answers to a number of his questions were literally just around the corner.  And he would take them… now!

*-*-*

OW!  Slippery bastard led around the corner with the butt of his rifle and caught her in the _goddamn nose!_

If she wasn’t awake before, she certainly was now, despite having been knocked square on her ass.  It wasn’t that pleasant of a sight, staring into the barrel of a high-powered gun that was probably as long as her leg, though perspective may have been playing tricks with her at that angle.  Who seriously needs a gun that long?  From what she knew about guns, they had a measure of potency called ‘caliber’, roughly measuring how damaging each shot was.  Snipers had some pretty nasty calibers, but all that seemed overkill at this point.  Even a needle in the eye socket would hurt like hell.  She was as good as dead.

Still, she made sure to respond in kind.  As if by reflex, she found her arm pointed right up at the sniper’s throat, with Sheol in tow but just a smidge too far away to kill.  Also, either for better or worse, she noticed how her heart had stopped beating again.  Ever since hearing that Sheol not only had a name, but was a potent magical sword, she feared that it might have a sentience to itself.  One day, perhaps Sheol might start wielding _her_.  She’d certainly heard of living weapons like this, and these weapons always expected the most demanding things of their wielders, as if not realizing their wielder’s mortality.  Was Sheol like this?  Or was this just her overactive imagination overreacting to reflexes that she had developed and refined over the years?  Maybe she had a lot more skills with a blade than she thought she had.

*-*-*

“RED:  93 / GREEN:  51 / BLUE:  23”

Though he remembered to turn off the infrared sight, he had forgotten to switch the analyzer mode on Quicksilver’s HUD.  Still set on determining exact color, it made little difference now.  One trigger pull later and it would be an inconsequential error that he would probably have a laugh about later, or as much as he ever had a laugh about anything.  Alas, it wouldn’t be quite that simple.  Though one eye fixed itself to the scope and the other squinted to maximize focus, he could still feel it against his neck.

It wasn’t a blade of metal, or of any other solid substance.  Rather, it felt like a force of warm, palpable will, though it felt sharp to his flesh nonetheless.  Could he depress the trigger before the aura cleaved his jugular in twain?  Quicksilver’s ionic discharges fired at speeds several times in excess of the speed of sound, so fast that they were better represented as a percentage of the speed of light.  He could also factor that in with the downward angle, which might offer gravitational contribution to the vector, and the ocular target which provided little more resistance than water between the barrel and that critical gray matter that was his true target.  Computing all of this would give a time of demise between cranial impulse and target death.  It was a complex, but doable calculation.  Would that be greater than or less than the speed at which a warrior could apply lethal force to critical blood vessels sufficient to cause damage beyond that which can be repaired within the threshold of the time between infliction and demise, assuming the sword wielder’s psychological state of…

Bah, he hated calculating the force of melee weaponry.  When the exertion force of a human applied, the forces were far too hard to calculate.  A human under average conditions could apply a sizable amount of force, though under duress that value could be amplified dramatically.  But the kind of external stimuli that could cause the precise level and nature of stress that could maximize one’s combat force…  This is why he preferred using a rifle.  Being a sniper is all about physics.  But reading the emotions of others required a level of poetic nuance that he was hilariously deficient in, even by his own admission.

*-*-*

The eventual beat of her heart reassured her, both that neither she nor Sheol were going crazy.  She was always a fast thinker, her thoughts going so fast that it often outpaced her own pulse.  Must’ve been a voidwalker thing, she always rationalized.  Given that though, if time was progressing like normal… _why hadn’t the bastard shot her yet?_

He didn’t look like much to her.  She’d seen enough of those rent-a-psycho types that seemed to be everywhere these days, and this particular sniper didn’t stand out.  Scruffy dark hair, likely having gone months without being washed, a darkened face stained only by dirt and clotted blood, tattered camo BDUs, fishing vests full of what she presumed to be ammo, grenades, and gadgetry for mayhem, and of course a massive gun that she had seen quite enough of by now, thank you very much.  His appearance lived up to every single clichéd stereotype, almost as if he was doing it on purpose.

From what she had seen on the outskirts of the dying voidwalker civilization, these types almost exclusively hunted lycanthropes.  It was quite the sport, the ultimate challenge in big game hunting, as if big game hunting was in any way challenging before.  Hunters used to chase after all sorts of cute and cuddly critters for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, but none of the animals had ever killed a person for no reason.  And even if they did, nothing like _this_ ever happened before.  Still, she couldn’t stand the killers.  It was a little-remembered fact that these guys used to hunt people, for fun and profit, of course.  They usually didn’t _eat_ their victim… usually.  Sometimes it was far worse.  Still, she didn’t discriminate much between them and the lycanthropes they hunted.  Killing for shits and giggles wasn’t cool, no matter who was doing it.  These guys and the lycanthropes were so equally vicious that they almost deserved each other.

Mercs also came off as chauvinist dickheads more often than not.  It wasn’t much surprise why they had no friends, and why female assassins were often _extraordinarily_ unhinged compared to their male counterparts.  (They were also a little on the slutty side, now that she thought about it.  She was certainly no prude, but dammit woman, show some class, not your ass!)  In this particular situation, one possible reason why she hadn’t been shot yet did come to mind, though she desperately wished it hadn’t.  The guy didn’t look all that bulky, but he certainly looked stronger than her in a straight-up contest of power.  What did he want?  Same thing every _pig_ wants…  She had to think of something else.

Mercifully, one way he did stand out, on closer scrutiny, is that he lacked any apparent secondary weapons, specifically knives.  Mercs tended to load up on handguns, shoulder-straps of ammunition, grenades, and knives.  Lots of knives.  So many that you could throw them and wouldn’t care if you found them again.  For a time, before finding Sheol, she once debated wielding knives herself.  Knives were melee weapons as well as resourceful tools, and they could even be thrown in a pinch.  But ultimately, the feeling it gave off bugged her.  The kinds of voidwalkers who ran around with a ton of knives were too often creepy leather-clad torture fetishists who got off on their victim’s pain, the sick fucks.  If she really was a closeted mercenary and didn’t want to admit it, this wasn’t the kind of image she wanted to present.  Show some class, not your ass, if you will.  If the sniper bearing down on her was a sadomasochist of some kind, either his other weapons were artfully concealed, or he’d have to get pretty creative with his one gun.

For a moment, she saw a slow, sly movement out the corner of her eye.  It was at this point that she realized that a bullet in the eye would not be how this story would end.

*-*-*

He peeked through his squinted eye, unaided by his sniper scope, curious to any more information about his target other than eye color.  And he finds none other than a waif of a girl with a glowing hot broadsword pointed straight at his throat.  That sword, which caught his attention far earlier than even its wielder, would have to be the zaangr’t weapon he tracked by its thermal trail, though it seemed peculiar upon more thorough contemplation.  The blade was lengthy and sharp, but slender, while zaangr’t are supernaturally strong.  He couldn’t imagine a weapon like that being very viable in zaangr’t hands, more likely blunting and breaking beneath their punishing physical prowess before very long.  Zaangr’t tended towards bulkier, more durable weapons that capitalized on their substantial physical strength.  But this sword was more of a rapier compared to his defied expectations, designed more for speed, piercing, and precise lethal blows.  For want of a better word it was a gentleman’s blade.  Or a gentlewoman’s blade, in this particular case.  Despite what he first thought of when imagining a human assassin employing zaangr’t arms, the weapon seemed more appropriate for its wielder than the wielder’s clients.  It’s possible she had the weapon before she was hired, though he couldn’t imagine the zaangr’t taking too kindly to her acquisition of a weapon that had far too many similarities to their own arsenal to be coincidental.

He had surely seen mercenaries, assassins, and other hired killers of various dispositions before, but this encounter still held an air of intriguing novelty.  Comparing her to the rest of them, he almost pitied her scrawny, malnourished frame.  And it was precisely that:  a frame, little more than a skeleton with skin and atrophied muscle clinging to it.  Voidwalkers may have godlike life spans and creative capabilities, but eating certainly helped.  Though it provided no necessary boon, most voidwalkers ate anyway because they simply enjoyed the taste of their favorite foods.  For some, it was like a balm for the soul, while others indulged their appetites on a regular basis because it made them feel more human, or whatever race that voidwalker elected to emulate.  Particularly given the extremely volatile extenuating circumstances, a voidwalker could be forgiven for simply forgetting to consume food, but it certainly shouldn’t result in the voidwalker in question wasting away to what another might consider a pitiable state.  The appearance made her look haunted, as if purposefully fasting in remembrance of some dark past, though he wasn’t about to guess as to what that was.  Lycanthropes were likely involved, though.  Lycanthropes were _always_ involved.

One of the things he had learned in his experience as a hired sniper is that when someone draws a weapon you had better assume that they know how to use it to deadly effect, regardless of whether the wielder looked to be skilled or not.  He had seen men built like granite edifices mewl like children as the lycanthropes finally came for them, much to the chagrin of those who flocked to these impressive-appearing warriors for their safety.  Conversely, as voidwalkers have the potential to be a manipulative bunch, some could take on unassuming, purposefully benign forms in order to ambush their target.  Such a possibility is a sniper’s worst nightmare, as it usually concludes with the sniper, caught in close quarters, beaten to death before they could clear enough distance between them and their target to respond.  The winnowing had not been kind to the voidwalkers, but those who survived had proven their mettle true.  And that included this girl, despite every initial implication suggesting she shouldn’t have withstood the initial raids.

His target’s appearance appeared so pitiable that it bordered on the contrived, and for that he should’ve pulled the trigger several heartbeats ago.  If nothing else, he saw how swiftly she could move, courtesy of her zaangr’t mysticism.  If that butchered lycanthrope at his back didn’t make her magnitude of threat abundantly clear, the blade at his throat swiftly removed all doubt.

He returned attention to the sight presented by Quicksilver’s scope.  The aim hadn’t strayed more than a millimeter off target, though how could it have at this range?  He had to admit, it was quite a determined look she had in her eye, as if to stare back at him through Quicksilver’s scope, easily betraying any attempts to hide anything but a vicious warrior under all that misfortune and hardship.  These were the eyes of someone with conviction.  These were the eyes of a killer, if not an incredibly experienced one.  That lycanthrope whose intestines now stain the Infinity Bridge’s hallowed grounds wasn’t her first kill, despite the amateur stroke.  (She could’ve done more damage with less effort by employing a single stab through the temple, he couldn’t help but critique.)  These were the eyes of the woman who had darted from pillar to pillar, throwing off his aim and bewildering Quicksilver’s scanners, something he’d never seen any living thing do before.  If she could tap into such sorcery from a weapon that so closely echoed zaangr’t technology, if not their aesthetics, then this seemingly-triumphant gesture was meaningless.  He was fully cognitively aware of this, and he reasoned that she was similarly aware of the mismatch at work here.  If anything, what steadied her hand?  His curiosity burned like an insatiable acidic sting.  He had to know more.

But as a chill ran through the air, he knew that he would have to wait.

*-*-*

It was an epiphany for her.  Apparently, she _did_ hate the lycanthropes more, after all.  Her shooter may have had sharp reflexes and a super-gun of some kind, but he had zero peripheral vision.  She could’ve stood up and walked away after it got him.  But nooooooo, she never wound up doing this sort of thing, even when presented with such great opportunities to get away with it scot-free.  It hadn’t been her dumbest idea ever, but it… well… all things considered…  Okay, it probably _was_ her dumbest idea ever.  But she needed this too badly.  Her friends needed this too badly.  Screw self-preservation.  These lycanthropes were gonna’ kill her sooner or later anyway.  She could either be safe and cautious, killing only a handful before they get her, or be daring and risky, and kill a _shitload_. 

As her heartbeat returned, she found herself perched upon the protruding, bear-like snout of one of the things.  It tried to shake her off, but she grabbed a fistful of the thing’s ear, or what she figured was its ear with the way it stood up on its own, and she swung around to the back of the creature’s neck.  The lycanthrope growled and panicked, trying desperately to shake off the assailant clinging to it.  It nearly succeeded too, given her difficulty to find any surface to grasp on the monster’s slick, frog-like hide.  She knew full well what would’ve happened to her if she couldn’t find a grip, so she raised Sheol up high and proceeded to make a grip, sinking the sword into the thing’s tree trunk of a neck, penetrating all the way to the hilt.

The lycanthrope answered her attack with a roar that shook her very teeth with its sheer intensity.  Still, it pleased her to feel that lycanthropes might understand the concept of imminent death.  If not, then nothing she had been doing since her friends died mattered.  After making her point, she figured it was about time to put the thing out of its depressingly insufficient misery.  As it swung from side to side, she hung onto Sheol for all she could.  After a hard swing to the left nearly threw her off, she propped her feet up against the lycanthrope’s neck and pulled like her life depended on it.  Sheol barely budged, and the lycanthrope quickly swung its head the other way, where she repeated the process.  After the fourth swing, getting only the barest movement out of Sheol, she held her breath and threw her full weight into the creature’s last thrash.  She felt her chest seize up, and at that very moment Sheol felt free.  She finally landed on her feet with a force that staggered her for a moment.  Flames that lashed around Sheol’s blade dimmed and went out like a candle in the wind.  Turning back, she found the lycanthrope’s head nearly severed from its enormous body.  Bone, muscle, and a shadowy skin parted in one clean, charred swing.  It would’ve bled all over the place if Sheol didn’t cauterize it.  Sheol’s blade wasn’t even half as long as the creature’s neck was wide, but she didn’t bother thinking this over for more than an instant.

*-*-*

RED:  0 / GREEN:  0 / BLUE: 0

With a slightly muffled discharge, Quicksilver had found its mark and the trigger found itself pulled back.  Such are the reflexes that can only be attained through discipline, experience, and approximately 40 CCs of high-yield anabolic stimulants in his arteries.  He had some inkling that this volume and concentration would kill a normal man, but a voidwalker was not a normal man.

The lycanthrope had covered quite a distance despite the ionic blast catching it in mid-lunge.  For a moment, he wondered if it might careen into him and incapacitate both him and his former target regardless, though Quicksilver’s projections put the beast tumbling off to the side at the last second based on its posture and movement.  The clockwork of physics ran its inevitable course and the clinically-deceased beast’s footing faltered at a critical stride, leading it to topple off to the side.  Inertia pulled the corpse into an uncoordinated somersault of sorts, where it inevitably landed to his left.

A quick, curious peer at Quicksilver’s HUD showed a blinking numerical counter, reading “1336” in rigid, luminous green numbers.  The blinking ceased once the dial counted up by one.  Though he kept no physical tally, his kill counter nonetheless intrigued him, even after entrusting such trivial notation to Quicksilver’s microcomputer.

*-*-*

They turned to face each other.  They recognized each other’s abilities, but had many questions.  It was fortunate for both of them that voidwalkers live for as long as they do.  Otherwise, they’d never find the time to ask.  They both knew what they wanted to know first, and neither of them wasted much time in asking.

“I’m Voidwalker Tapp,” he said.  “Not bad with that sword.”

“I’m Voidwalker Lana,” she said.  “Nice shooting.”


	2. Survival of the Friendliest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lycanthropes of the Paracanis Wyrm genus attacked and destroyed a kingdom in the sands. Only one survivor escaped the burning rubble: a girl called Voidwalker Angel. A girl with a power that could only be described as miraculous.

Voidwalker Angel fell to her knees in despair.  What else could she do?  So much destruction, so much carnage, so much blood… she’d never seen anything like it before.

A kingdom in the sands.  The crown jewel of a mighty empire.  Resting place to one of the strongest magical powers on the Infinity Bridge, or so she was told.  Is that why these monsters attacked here?  Were they trying to make some kind of point?  It seemed unlikely, given her brief glimpses of the things.  But the more she thought about it, the less she wanted to think about it any further.

Their bodies wound long like snakes, but their heads were like dragons, with long, spear-like snouts pushed out from a face with glowing red eyes.  Their dark, scaly skin clashed against the sun-bleached sand and stone that made up this once thriving kingdom.  They seemed to have some kind of mystical aura about them, but she couldn’t tell for sure.  She thought she was at least kinda’ brave, but not stupid, and she wasn’t about to stare one down to find out.  These things were but animals.  They have no mercy or pity.  They seemed to only eat and destroy, often doing both at the same time as they crushed mighty stone towers with equal ease as human flesh and bone.

She couldn’t think about that anymore.  All she could do was run away from that horrible sight, an image burned into her memory for what she feared might be the rest of her life.  She never imagined that someone could bleed so much.  Or that a human body could make that… that _horrible_ crunching sound...

She knew every creation had a creator, but these things… what sick person would create them?  Were they some kind of failed experiment?  Or was some other voidwalker just having a very, _very_ bad day?  It seemed beyond reason that some voidwalker would be enough of a fiend to do any of this on purpose, even to make some kind of grisly point.  And she knew of some pretty dark and twisted voidwalkers.  She almost wished for their company at this point.  She was no fighter, never seeing much point in becoming skilled at destroying what another had worked so hard to create, but in situations like this, destroying the monsters seemed the only salvation possible.

One of her friends once said it was always better to have a gun and not need it than need one and not have it.  She scoffed at the time, thinking the comment was either made out of some deep-seated paranoia, or as some obscure in-joke that she largely missed, but no.  This tragedy, this _disaster_ proved that he had a point all along:  sometimes, to save lives, you must destroy living things.  The Infinity Bridge can have a very dark sense of humor sometimes.

All she could do was flee to the sandy outskirts of the kingdom, where she would watch as it burned and crumbled.  From a distance, the serpentine monsters tore through the city, wrapping around it and punching holes through it like worms eating through a rotten apple.  Small specks of light would burst off and around their skins, twinkling like stars off in the distance.  The sorcerers and sorceresses who stayed and fought were throwing everything they had into this losing battle.  She knew they could use her help, that they needed her.  But what could she do?  She may be a voidwalker, but she couldn’t wave her hands and instantly destroy this plague of serpents, no matter how much she wished she could.  But she knew that, somehow, some way, she probably could’ve made a difference.

Making a difference.  It was the burden of her power as a voidwalker.  She knew of some voidwalkers who could handle it, or at least hide the fact that they couldn’t, but she wasn’t like them.  She didn’t see the Infinity Bridge like a battlefield.  To her, it was more of a blank parchment, a bleached canvas, a tender lump of clay.  She could mold it and shape it to her will, but that was really all she cared to do.  She loved the ability to make new friends, quite literally in fact, but she didn’t want to play God.  She was aware of the burden, and thought it far too heavy for her shoulders.  If anything, she wanted to play _human_.  _Their_ yoke is easy.  _Their_ burden is light.

The kingdom that crumbled off in the distance knew her, both who and what she was.  She wasn’t about to hide it.  To her, lying was just a matter of time until you got found out.  At any rate, they seemed to respect her well enough.  Maybe even like her.  They weren’t unsettled by her power, like the people of so many other worlds she had visited and left.  They didn’t bow to her, or offer her the throne, or perform other acts of servitude that she would’ve rejected anyway.  She neither received nor wanted special treatment of any kind simply for being a voidwalker.  No… she was one of them.  An outsider, yes, but so seamlessly integrated into their ways and their culture that you could hardly have picked her out of it.  More than any other place she had ever known or visited, this felt like home.  This _was_ her home.  No matter where else she ever went, she could have always returned here and be welcome.

She _could_ _have_ …

*-*-*

Dark gore sizzled as it sputtered onto the sands when Sheol’s forge-hot blade found its mark in the thing’s neck.  Then again, where _else_ was she supposed to strike a snake?  The ankle?  No matter, that was the last of them.  The last one they had intercepted, anyway…

Voidwalker Lana lowered her hood and raised her goggles, the sandstorm having subsided.  Still, she grimaced with discomfort until she sat down on the sands and finally removed one of her sneakers.  As she tipped the footwear upside-down, it poured out sand like a wounded hourglass.

“Of all the worlds in all the Infinity Bridge, why couldn’t the lycanthropes have ambushed someplace with a more human-friendly climate?” she complained, only half-serious.  She had to admit, if the lycanthropes were going to strike, an already desolate desert was probably the best they could’ve hoped for.  Regardless, her friend seemed to ignore her.

A heavily-cloaked figure of similar stature looked out over the desert sands that were seemingly striped with enormous, dark serpents, the likes of even the smallest would’ve made even the most ferocious Triassic leviathans cower.  Their looks weren’t just empty intimidation, either.  They were formidable creatures, not only resilient but far faster than anything that size had any right to be.  Fortunately, they had all been slain.  Unfortunately, there were far more, and he knew it.

The figure was covered from head to toe, so much that Lana could barely tell who it was if she didn’t know that there was only one other voidwalker in the whole bridge stupid enough and crazy enough to follow her around.  Or was she the stupid, crazy one for following him?  Ah, screw it.  It baffled her how Tapp could survive the heat of the desert dressed like that.  When she questioned him about it before the mission, he simply sighted his desire to avoid sunburn.  Pfft, she was pastier than he was.

He wore a thick tan cloak, similar to hers, both of which were lightly-colored enough to blend right into the sand if the need came up.  Despite its weight, it apparently provided enough shade to offset the heat of direct sunlight.  Under the cloak’s hood, he wore both tinted goggles and a scarf.  On his feet he wore the same dark boots he always seemed to wear.  They didn’t look comfortable, never did, but they seemed to fit tight enough to keep the sand out of his socks.  It was more than Lana could say for her own footwear as she emptied out her other shoe.  On his left hand, he wore a thick, heavy glove, seemingly the same material as their cloaks, while his right hand sported the only exposed skin on his body through a similar glove but with the trigger finger exposed.  This minute area of skin had already turned red and dusty from the harsh elements.  Still, this small bit of exposure was absolutely necessary.  It’d be harder for him to work his gun otherwise, though she imagined that he’d get pretty pissed if he somehow managed to sunburn his trigger finger.

A modified Quicksilver hung from a strap, slung along Tapp’s back.  Naturally, its scope had been detached, as one of the dumbest things you could possibly do in a setting with a bright sun hanging in a cloudless sky is to stare into what essentially amounts to a telescope.  Accounting for this lack of assisted aiming, the barrel of the gun had been shortened dramatically.  It appeared as if Tapp simply eschewed aim altogether, though the shorter barrel had a manual iron sight accommodated to it.

The sheer hardware of the rifle fascinated Lana, as Tapp had designed it so that it could be dismantled and rebuilt for seemingly any task.  In this particular case, the rifle had been reduced to little more than its boxy chassis and a short barrel, easily fitting across its wielder’s back, though still about as bulky as a heavy machine gun.  Whatever he had done, it also seemed to fire like a machine gun as well, though only in limited, sparse bursts.  She had seen enough of how fluidly he operates with his standard rifle configuration that this particular mode seemed suboptimal in his hands.  She wondered whether these modifications were because of the bright sun in this world, the increased toughness of this particular lycanthrope strain… or whether he’s just putting out enough firepower to make up for her lack of it.

Tapp glanced about through his shady goggles as readings projected against the insides of the lenses, much akin to Quicksilver’s scope.  He had to admit, it made for such an efficient, hands-free system that he wondered why he didn’t use these more often.  Maybe he would, after this was all over.  As he pondered, the microcomputer took full readings from the surroundings and poured out a veritable fountain of output.  Most of it was unnecessary data, including his new kill tally, but the information he was looking for finally crossed his path of vision.  Reading it, he slightly adjusted the scarf over his mouth, as if to reassure himself that it was still there.

“PARACANIS AIRBORNE PATHOGENS DETECTED

CURRENT SATURATION:  0.2691%

LOW TOXICITY”

Despite the seeming reassurance of his supercomputer-enhanced spectacles, he didn’t like what he saw.  As if being as long as a train wasn’t enough, this was a poisonous strain of lycanthrope.  The saturation levels were hardly lethal at the moment, but with so many of the lycanthrope dead surrounding them, the area would become essentially uninhabitable within a week at most.  Fortunately, this was in the middle of the desert.  No living thing should be here anyway.

_Paracanis Wyrm_.  He knew this strain.  He should’ve stopped it a long time ago, back when he was armed with a volume of firepower that made Quicksilver alone seem impoverished.  If he knew back then what he knew about his resource woes at the current moment, he probably would’ve burnt through as much of his ammunition as possible, rather than stingily stashing it away, only… only to lose it all.  Like an _idiot_.

That day, while not his stupidest moment, was hardly his proudest.  Paracanis Wyrm was one of the larger lycanthropes barreling down at their position, but it wasn’t isolated.  Unlike his momentary allies (is there any other kind of ally?), he figured it more worthwhile to take out more of the lesser creatures flanking it than to pour a random, potentially unfathomable amount of firepower into stopping the dragon-strain lycanthrope from breaching Great Aegis, and he would stick by that decision no matter how much Lana brought up how this world’s plight was _his_ fault, after she found out about what happened.

It may have been a large and presumably powerful lycanthrope, but it was ultimately a single lycanthrope.  It had to retain its singularity until it made it to another world, one of the few limitations known about lycanthropes at the time.  Would he have one dimension assaulted by one strain of powerful lycanthrope, or another hundred dimensions assaulted by lycanthropes that were weaker, but so numerous that it would take centuries to fully purge?  Even then, the stain of lycanthropes never truly dies.  Wherever they die, more seem to appear shortly after in the same area.  This could only be neutralized by incinerating their corpses, or so the garrisoned zaangr’t advised.  His split-second decision of target priority had signed this world’s eventual death warrant, but had spared hundreds.  Billions upon billions of lives would pass by naturally, never knowing the sight of a lycanthrope, all because of his decision.  But neither voidwalker nor zaangr’t ever saw it this way, despite all his perfectly sound explanations.  When Lana found out about it… suffice it to say that there’s just no pleasing some people.

“Get up.  We have to get moving again, and fast,” Tapp finally declared, turning his back to the dead creatures.  “We can’t let the lycanthropes that slipped past us get away.  Besides, if we stay here any longer, the toxic pheromones will build up to a lethal concentration.”

“ _Toxic_ pheromones?” Lana repeats with a dreary exhaustion, not so much in disbelief that the lycanthropes found a new way to kill them, but annoyed that they still tried.  “Gotta’ love a lycanthrope that leaves a parting gift…” she quipped grimly.

After seeing first-hand how lycanthropes tend to behave from a tactical perspective, which Tapp absolutely insisted on drilling into her head at every opportunity, she finally saw the stupid-ass animals for what they were.  They were nothing to fear.  Not anymore.

She reached for the scarf hanging loosely around her neck and pulled it up over her mouth and nose.  She didn’t take too kindly to Tapp’s orders or his tone at the best of times.  She thought she might get used to his drill-sergeant-like expectations of her someday, but that day had still yet to come.  Still, she knew that he was dead serious about lycanthrope stuff, and so she didn’t even bother questioning him anymore.  She rationalized that, in his own quirky, tactless way that he had enough humanity to sincerely want to keep her alive.  She stood up, covered her face, dusted herself off, and followed along.

“What about the dead ones?” Lana asked through her muffling scarf.

He didn’t even turn to face her.  “Leave them,” Tapp answered with a voice rich in contempt for the slain lycanthropes, diminished in evident fury only by his scarf.  “Let them fry in the sun like the worms they are…”

They wouldn’t fry, though.  He knew they wouldn’t.  Their flesh had an amazing tolerance for all kinds of inhospitable and uncomfortable weather, even posthumously.  From what he had seen, it took Sheol’s flame to burn their bodies down, which had the side-effect of putting his ally into cardiac arrest.  She had a voidwalker’s constitution and usually recovered without incident, but it limited their combat potential for at least a few hours.  Given that he had to watch her back when she harnessed Sheol’s power, he didn’t want to have to deal with this side-effect for longer than he had to, and so he discouraged her use of it.  If they did all the fighting, the fickle zaangr’t could at least attend to the containment.  He had far grander intents at the moment:  stop Paracanis Wyrm, and exterminate the entire strain.  Maybe then, sleep would finally cease evading him.

A few hours later, all signs of that ferocious battle had disappeared behind a sandy horizon.  The sun had descended across the sky, illuminating the horizon with its golden glow as its heat mercifully relented.

*-*-*

The havoc in the city began to die down, or so Angel reckoned when the twinkling flashes of combat got fewer and further between.  For a populous place, it wouldn’t take that long for what she estimated to be a hundred of those dragon-things to wipe the city of all life.  All while she watched helplessly.

Thinking about it, she considered that the monsters wrecking her home couldn’t have hurt her worse if they had actually killed her.  They _let_ her escape.  Either she was just incredibly lucky and read way too much into her own survival, or the monsters were intelligent, and frighteningly so.  But she found that hard to believe.  The only thing that can create true intelligence is _another_ intelligence.  It’s practically Voidwalker Rule #1:  you can’t create anything more intelligent than yourself.  No one can.

The thought was a sour one, as it suggested that these things _were_ actually sent by something bigger and nastier.  The Infinity Bridge as a whole was a place more fantastic and more terrible than she could imagine.  She hadn’t strayed far from this particular world in ages.  In fact, the furthest she had ever gone from this place was up to a fortress colony on the Infinity Bridge that its inhabitants called Great Aegis.  Those who lived there claimed it to be the largest, safest, and most heavily fortified defensive lines on the entire Infinity Bridge.  She had seen this place only once in her lifetime… and she never wished to see anything like it again.  It may have represented strength and safety for some, but to her, it stood for how terrible the Infinity Bridge can be, and how terrible you have to become if you want to survive it.

Beyond Great Aegis was a whole other side of the Infinity Bridge, home to worlds wracked by violence, despair, and chaos, practically the dark side of the Infinity Bridge.  According to legend, Great Aegis was built by mighty heroes across the Infinity Bridge to stop evil forces from their worlds from spilling their villains into worlds like this one, worlds too peaceful to survive their full assault.  Worlds like this one.  These monsters, or whatever had sent them, had to have come from the other side of that great defensive line.  It doesn’t inspire confidence that they were evidently able to breach it.  She felt her entire soul sink at the thought.  If you can’t trust in Great Aegis… what _can_ you trust?

As the sunlight gradually faded, it was replaced with a bright full moon and a celestial sphere full of stars in the night sky.  The ruins of that once-magnificent architecture grew mercifully dim.  The castle, once tall and proud, had caved in across one full side, and dark, worm-like tendrils continued to slither around what remained.  It was not a fortress of strength, or of kindness.  It was a reminder of defeat, an monument standing only as a reminder of the slaughter of an entire kingdom.

She figured that the princess and her brother fought to the bitter end.  They were generally kind royalty, despite rumors that the king would cause his little sister some playful sibling grief every now and then.  They didn’t deserve this.  She hoped they would’ve escaped, but that wasn’t their way and she knew it.  She wished she could’ve made some kind of meaningful difference, but they sent her off before she could join them.  In her defense, the spell looked more like the rites to a protection charm, not a teleportation spell, though she should have figured.  They told her to escape.  When she refused, they didn’t give her a choice.

She figured they meant for her to get help, to call in favors from her many allies from across the Infinity Bridge.  But though she was friendly to the kingdom and its people, she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with them when it came to this…  They never really asked her, so she didn’t see it necessary to point out that she didn’t keep company with other voidwalkers.  It wasn’t personal.  She was already friends with pretty much the entire kingdom, so saw little reason to befriend those more like herself.  True friendship isn’t about being best buddies with clones of yourself anyway.  She certainly wasn’t friends with any powerful voidwalker warriors or sorcerers, let alone ones capable of turning back such a bleak tide.  She did know of _one_ , though she hadn’t heard from him in years.  Knowing what he was like, it was probably for the better anyway.  If the kingdom truly sent her to get help, then their efforts were in vain, and she can’t help but feel a knot of guilt in the pit of her stomach that they would’ve let her fight at their side if she had told them the truth.  The _whole_ truth.  Then she could’ve died with dignity.  It would’ve been painful.  It would’ve been scary.  It would’ve been… _proper_.

As if in response to such dreary, morbid thoughts, she began to feel the sand beneath her knees and between her fingers tremble on its own.  Maybe the desert consume her and put this miserable sight, this miserable life behind her.  Maybe in another million years, the Infinity Bridge will be a friendly place again.

She finally looked up…

…and saw the jaws of the desert itself emerge from the sand.

*-*-*

With the sun finally down, Tapp wasted no time in parking with his back to a tall sand dune.  He lowered his hood and drew Quicksilver, which drew Lana’ attention in a hurry.  Likewise, she fell back onto the sandy hill a few paces away, hoping that whatever Tapp had spotted might miss her altogether.

Lana cast a glance up at her friend, who fiddled with his gun incoherently.  She could barely tell in the dark, only to remember the tinted goggles strapped to her face.  Tediously rolling her eyes, she raises her shaded goggles.  She didn’t exactly have to worry about going blind from looking directly at the _moon_.

Fearing the worst over the horizon, Lana raised Sheol.  She hadn’t let the blade loose from her gloved hands since she entered this world, and she never planned to.  The two voidwalkers had noticed this potential inconvenience before, and Tapp had suggested to her to find or design a sheath for Sheol.  Apparently, for supposedly _not_ being a zaangr’t sword, according to Tapp’s mysterious ‘sources’, Sheol had quite the temper when it came to being stored.  It would cut any leather strap or chain link, seemingly falling right through any binding on its own.  Wood scabbards would burst into flame, while a plastic or metallic sheathes would melt away.  Yeah, fucking _metal_ would melt clean off it.  Eventually, she figured that she’d just carry the thing, and this never seemed to bother her too much.  She rarely noticed the extra weight, and it grew so dull when away from combat that accidentally bumping into it never seemed to cause any injuries or damage.  Still though, Sheol was always sharpest when she needed it most, the fickle thing.  (A lot like a certain voidwalker she could name…)  She would get to the bottom of this weapon one of these days, she swore it.

With the aid of a small hand ratchet pulled from one of his scores of pockets, Tapp twisted off some bolts holding Quicksilver’s iron sight barrel to the weapon’s casing.  He then slipped the barrel under his cloak, pulling out a similar version of the same barrel, only without the iron sight.  After attaching the barrel and fixing it into position, he then eagerly dug into another of his many pockets and pulled out Quicksilver’s scope.  The barrel was still shorter, compromising quite a bit of accuracy, but he could replace it later.  He counted himself fortunate that he no longer had to shoot Quicksilver from the hip anymore.  It felt incredibly imprecise.  Still, he kept the rapid fire setting on.  He feared this might someday be Quicksilver’s new default, considering the power and ammunition it consumed, but he was no longer a solitary mercenary.  Given his utter inexperience at operating in a fire team (albeit a poor man’s fire team, when the latter of that team relied more on a magic sword than anything dependable), his operational procedures and tactics would have to be modified through trial and error.  And he didn’t like error.

But he was ready for the immediate trial, and that was as ready as he ever needed to be.

Tapp made a hasty, two-finger gesture pointing up the direction of the hill.  Whether Lana saw that or not was questionable, but he didn’t have the time to repeat it.  The sun had set low enough that the lycanthropes now had the cover of darkness to their advantage.  He hoped to be done before this, but was prepared nevertheless.  At this stage, a lycanthrope could be on the other side of any dune, or even tunneling under the sand.  Whoever wasn’t ready would die, and he could only hope that Lana was up for the challenge.  If not... well, at least he could take up a long-barreled rifle again.  For the briefest of moments, the thought seemed melancholy for a reason he couldn’t precisely pinpoint.

Without a word, Tapp turned onto his stomach and deftly crawled up the hill on his hands and knees, silent as a shadow.  Lana turned her head up just in time to catch her friend ascending to the crest of the hill, and she made sure to follow swiftly behind.  She held Sheol parallel to the ground, pointed down the hill to hide their position.  If there was one easily-preventable thing that would’ve screwed them over big-time, it would be letting a glowing magic sword give their position away.  It was little removed from waving around a big “eat me” sign for self-defense.

Lana finally broke the crest of the dune and rested her left arm on the top of the hill.  She looked out over the gentle, downward slope, but couldn’t see much in the dark.

“Spot anything?” Tapp muttered to her in a hushed tone.

Lana continued to stare on ahead, seeing little more than a desert that continued to stretch on as far as she could see.  She strained her eyes to see through the dark, hoping in vain to spot whatever her self-proclaimed commander had found.  It was times like this that she probably should’ve mentioned her need of glasses to read fine print.

“Do.  You.  Spot anything?” Tapp repeated, similarly hushed, but with a bit more oomph than before.

Lana finally decided to just give up, at which point she turned to Tapp.  She found the sniper as still as a statue, with one eye peering through his rifle’s scope, which housed all sorts of infrared and magnification gadgetry that undoubtedly gave him an unfair advantage at spotting.  She couldn’t hide a somewhat amused grin at his absurd expectations.  Jackass.

Lana brazenly plucked Tapp’s rifle right from out of his grip, eager to see what he was so insistent on pointing out.  Tapp didn’t even bother fighting her for the superior gaze of the scope.  In fact, he seemed to expect it, even handing the rifle over to her.  Lana adjusted the butt of the rifle against her shoulder, as poised as she’s seen a number of wannabe poser gun experts do in the past.  She lowered her right eye to the awaiting scope, resting her cheek against the metallic frame of the casing.  When she felt the metal warm to her cheek, she knew she was resting in the right place. 

Finally, after fidgeting with the grip and its placement, she drew the weapon across the horizon, scanning for anything out of the ordinary.  She figured that Tapp must’ve gotten tired of this some time ago, as even with her full visual attention focused on the scope, she could feel his hand grab the rifle’s casing and manually adjust the aim in the proper direction.

“Jackass…” Lana muttered under her breath.  A moment later, she hoped that Tapp couldn’t hear her.  Another moment later, and she figured that he probably wouldn’t care, even if he did hear her.  Yet another moment later, her friend’s coarse attitude was the last thing on her mind.

Quicksilver’s scope felt as if it was actively assaulting her brain with as much overflowing jibberish as possible.  She wondered how Tapp could even see anything out of it without losing track of where he was aiming, sort of defeating the point of putting such an advanced computer in his sniper scope to begin with.  However, the scope ultimately did its job and Lana finally found what Tapp was so annoyingly eager to point out.

“There’s someone out there,” Lana responded urgently, practically shouting in comparison to her previous tone.  She briefly lifted her head from the scope in an adrenaline-fuelled panic, but she readjusted her gaze.  The shock threw her aim off a bit, but she quickly corrected it.  She would have to correct it further downwards, as the human silhouette began running towards their position.  One of the scope’s several data dump apps fed her a distance estimate:  “0.452 KM”.  Not quite half a kilometer away, apparently.  No wonder she couldn’t see the approaching figure without the scope.

“It’s a survivor, and they’re on the move,” Lana noted.  “Whoever it is, they’re coming our way.”

“And at the speed they’re traveling, they’re likely not alone…” Tapp supplemented the observation.

Lana handed Tapp back his rifle, and he took it back with an over-handed grip on the weapon’s boxy frame.  “Got a plan?”

“You wound me,” Tapp replied to her, bearing his cold wit like only he could.  “I _always_ have a plan.”

Make some noise, make some noise, make some noise…  Lana repeated this mantra in silent thought.  She knew Tapp always had a plan, asking only out of formality.  And of all his plans, this was probably her favorite.  Yeah, he got to sit back on the safety of some raised balcony, bridge, or cliff while she was quite literally thrown to the wolves.  He would stress the importance of providing covering fire from an extreme distance, though she couldn’t shake the fact that he was just bullshitting her.  For as long as she’d known him, she always wound up with the lion’s share of the kills, especially against these dragon-breeds where he barely got any kills at all.  Whatever.  If he really didn’t give a damn about killing lycanthropes, then more vengeance for her.

Tapp lied.  Most of his plans involved just making things up as he went.  He usually didn’t have a plan laid out until right before implementing it.  Lana might not seem the most sophisticated ally on the Infinity Bridge, but he never thought her a fool.  Quite the contrary, he almost waited for the day where she would call him out on his ‘plans’, considering how they almost always involved throwing her into combat to cause commotion while he picked off any targets that tried to outflank her.  She never did fully grasp the important role of providing covering fire.  Or maybe… maybe she knew all along, and she just wanted to die.

Still, he had to say something.  And so he did.  “…Make a _lot_ of noise,” he blurted out.

Subtlety, thy name is Voidwalker Tapp.  He would be that girl’s death someday.  Hopefully, when that day comes, she wouldn’t take it personally.

Lana fought the urge to pump her fist in triumph.  If Tapp knew how much she enjoyed this, he might try and get her to learn to use guns herself, just to spite her.  “Ah… crap,” she feigned a grumble, hoping she wasn’t being too obvious about it.  Then again, this was Voidwalker Tapp.  The guy couldn’t catch a hint with an acre of flypaper.  “Well, if you insist-”

“I _do_ insist.”

…Okay, _two_ acres of flypaper.

*-*-*

Of _course_ Angel ran.  She wasn’t about to make it easy for her pursuers.  There was always the chance that they were just being super-territorial, seeking to drive her off their newly-conquered land before settling down.  If she gave them enough space, they might give up, allowing her to lick her wounds, grab an orange soda, and collect her thoughts.  This assumed that the monsters trailing her were simple animals, though…  It was a small hope, but the only one she had left to cling to as her boots pounded away at the moonlit desert.

In just a few short hours, she had forgotten how big the things were up close.  That, or these were even _bigger_ monsters than the few she had seen.  They tore after her through the sand like sharks.  She didn’t dare to turn back and count them.  The things would be right underneath her in moments anyway, and she wasn’t exactly used to running for her life.  And if she was going to run for her life, she might as well make the best possible effort.

Angel threw off her heavy hooded cloak, letting it fly back freely.  She’d bake in the sun if she survived until morning, but first she’d have to make it that long, and she doubted she would.  As the weight left her behind, she dared a glance back at her pursuers.  There were three of the snake monsters coming at her in a V-formation, pointed right at her of course.  There may have been more behind them, but she couldn’t pick them out in the dark of night.  Their glowing crimson eyes just barely broke the surface of the sand that parted seamlessly at their advance, going so fast that she seemed to stand still despite her best efforts.  As her cloak fluttered past the lead creature, it raised its jaws from the sand and chomped it right out of the air before dipping back into the sand.

That sight gave her a second wind, and she tried her best to make it count.

*-*-*

Lana made the most of her momentum charging downhill, but when forced to cross what amounted to half a kilometer of desert, she got winded before long.  She kinda’ hoped that the survivor would at least meet her halfway, but that’s still about two hundred meters down range from Tapp’s hiding place, far longer than she could run in a single wind.

She did, however, begin to pick out the forms of some of the lycanthrope dragons downrange.  Their glowing red eyes certainly helped distinguish them from the night sky, and she could count quite a few pairs in the distance.  They were pretty low to the sand, from what she could see.  They also seemed to be moving in the same direction, though the ones on the edges seemed to be deviating further away.  She’d seen this before.  They were about to circle in the survivor.

Lana glanced down at Sheol.  She could flash-step over there easily, but she’d be drained by the time she got to the fight.  Tapp ran numerous tests on her, seeing if he could find some way around Sheol’s side-effect, but nothing seemed to make a difference.  Even his personal cocktail of adrenaline boosters were defied by Sheol’s screw-logic-I’m-magic properties.  But she’d known Sheol far longer than she’d known Tapp.  Heck, she knew Sheol for longer than she knew it had a _name_.  Sheol isn’t the kind of weapon you can manipulate into submission, making it do whatever you want.  Try it, and it’ll fight you every step of the way.  Instead, just try to understand it as best you can, and it’ll be ready when the time is right.

And the time doesn’t get much more right than this.

“Fuck it,” she muttered.

*-*-*

Angel knew she was dead when she saw two of the monsters pass her on either side.  Actually, to be truly honest, she’d known she was dead when she saw them coming after her.  This just sealed the deal.  Before long, they were making large circles around her, cutting off her escape.  It didn’t seem to matter, as she couldn’t keep that pace of running up forever.  She finally dropped to her knees and gave up as the monsters rose from the ground and…

All of a sudden, they all turned their heads off to one direction, staring off into the horizon.  Angel turned her own gaze, and when she saw what surely caught their eyes, it was easy to see why it got their attention.

It glowed like an amber star in the middle of the desert, waving back and forth like a baton.  A woman’s screaming call in the distance accompanied it.

“HEEEEY!” the advancing figure called out, though the distance muffled her scream a bit.

In that brief, desperate moment, she dared to hope.  Could it be?  Did the princess escape, too?  And did she come find her?  …Oh no…

“GO!  Get outta’ here!” Angel called back.

“HEEEEEY!  COOOOME THIIIIIS WAAAAAY!” the advancing figure called again, approaching even closer.

It certainly seemed reasonable that it could’ve been the princess.  She never knew the princess to fear anything, especially when one of her subjects was in trouble.  She’d throw herself right in harm’s way to save one of her countrymen, and even more so for a personal friend.  But what’s with that glowing thing she’s waving around?  Was this even really the princess of-

“HEY!  OVER HERE, YOU _UGLY SONS OF BITCHES!_ ”

Well, that answered that question.  On some level, it relieved her, as the princess would’ve probably done something incredibly reckless and stupid, preserving the slightest of chances that the princess _did_ escape.  Instead, she and a _complete_ _stranger_ are going to get eaten by other-worldly dragons.

…The thought didn’t provide the comfort she was hoping for.

*-*-*  
Lana had one critical edge over the dragon-lycanthropes.  For all their size and might, they were pretty damn stupid, no matter how devilishly clever Tapp insisted they were.  And nothing captivates the attention of a moron like a bright, shiny object waving in the distance.  At least that’s what she was counting on.  After that flash-step to get here, she was pretty drained and would have to rest for a moment before tapping Sheol’s power again.  She hoped Sheol’s natural light show might provide that critical moment of rest.  She also hoped that Tapp might make his presence known by putting some of the bastards down from his distant position, but she didn’t believe in _miracles_ …

It seemed she had arrived just in the nick of time, as the lycanthropes finally rose out of the sand, perched and ready to strike.  This breed only did that when they had their prey cornered.  In fact, now that she thought of it, lycanthropes generally cornered their prey first.  Terrified voices screaming her name called back to her, but only in her memories.  Still, she gripped Sheol with all the might her right hand could muster.  She knew them.  They may not have been killed by this precise species, let alone these exact lycanthropes, but it was as good of a payback as she was going to get.

The lycanthropes’ stunned curiosity finally wore off and they finally came at her.  With all their eyes pointed at her, she got a count on them:  five in all.  Meh… it was as good of a payback as she was going to get.

She wasn’t about to flash-step around and kill them that way.  With the size and clumsiness of the things, she hardly had to.  That said, Sheol had a whole bag of tricks up its sleeve, some of which even Tapp didn’t know about.  She even had a feeling that Sheol still had some abilities that _she_ didn’t even know about.  By her estimations, Sheol seemed to surprise her at times with its capabilities.  She’d learn something new about it every fight.  She wondered what Sheol would teach her this time…

Lana quickly slashed Sheol through the air in a high arc.  The lycanthropes were still quite a distance off, but this didn’t stop one of them from being torn open by a wound it must not have even realized it had taken until it started moving, and by then it was too late.  Its head came off in a clean slice, and its body would tumble to the sands a split-second later, drooping onto the desert floor like a marionette cut from its strings.  It was quite the stylistic kill, but it wasn’t easy.  Oddly, for a sword technique, it was more useful the further away she was from the target.  Up close, she would have to stop her heart for far longer to achieve the same effect.

She grasped Sheol’s haft in both her hands and braced for the other four to come her way.

“That’s it!  Step right up and get your free ass-kicking!  Two lines, _no waiting!_ ”

*-*-*

The severed dragon-head nearly landed on Angel, missing her only by the distance of a quick, sideways leap.  Its impact kicked up a cloud of sand.  It sprinkled the desert’s plentiful grainy sand into her hair, but ducking and covering made it little more than an inconvenience.  When the dust finally settled, the mouth on the severed dragon head hung wide open, and in between its teeth she could roughly make out light-colored cloth fabric fragments stuck between its teeth.  It took her a moment to rationalize that this tattered thing was once her cloak.

But she was safe, all thanks to a woman that basically just walked in from the horizon.  Out of curiosity, Angel approached the fighting to try and get a better look, but was slowed by her burning, sore muscles that had pushed themselves to the their limits already.

On the advance, Angel watched as the four serpent monsters loomed over the warrior that had killed their fifth.  She couldn’t make out the warrior very well for the dark of night and distance between them, but she could see the fiery glow off in the distance as it darted about acrobatically, just barely driving away the creatures with long swings or diving out of their way when they dove in for the kill.  Even living under such a proverbial rock as this desert world for such a long time, Angel had certainly seen sword wielders before, but this one was different.  This one fought with a fluid discipline, almost dancing around her attackers than actually fighting them.  She wondered how much training she herself would require to even compare with a swordswoman of such poise, elegance, and grace…

*-*-*

_Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!_

This was a stupid, reckless idea, and at this very moment Lana questioned why _this_ was her favorite plan.  Though mere seconds ago, she once thought this fight to be a violent and righteous curb-stomping in memory of those that had fallen around her, in memory of those she couldn’t save, but it was a bit different actually _in_ the fight.  This wasn’t about vengeance.  This wasn’t about sport.  This was about survival, survival against the nastiest foes the Infinity Bridge had to throw at her.

Lana noticed that, particularly in the dark of night, the lycanthropes seemed repelled by Sheol’s natural glow.  And so she used Sheol to hold them off, though she wielded it in more of a swinging, swatting fashion than with any intent to cut or stab.  Eventually, the lycanthropes started wising up and lunging in at the same time, hoping she wouldn’t be able to dodge two of them at once.  Fortunately for Lana, they weren’t incredibly agile beasts at this range.  Even their fastest dive was easily telegraphed as their heads always reared back before a lunge.  The only real problem was that they had surrounded her, forcing her to have eyes in the back of her head to see their attacks coming.  When she missed a lycanthrope rearing back, she preferred to dive out of its way before it caught her, rather than trying to match it head-on with Sheol.

She had to thin the herd.  She had to kill at least one of them, _any_ of them.  And she had to do it quickly, before they got a hit in out of sheer chance and persistence.

*-*-*

Tapp wasn’t about to let Lana charge in alone.  He had been trailing her silently now for quite some time.  He needed to get closer than roughly half a kilometer away to assure reliably fatal hits on the agile Paracanis Wyrm genus, but this was more of a convenient afterthought.  In actuality, Lana had demonstrated some performance anxiety barriers, which he surmised after overseeing her training as of late.  Naturally, to get as accurate a reading as possible, such ‘training’ would involve watching over her from a distance as he sent her into combat with live lycanthropes, though usually against the more manageable and plenteous Paracanis Hound genus.  However, such experiments on live people would often need to continue indefinitely.  He noticed that people had a tendency to defy his experimentally-predicted behavior patterns, and so he needed to maintain the experiment for as long as possible to ensure his assessment was as accurate as possible.

Voidwalker Lana, ever a living, breathing proof of the placebo effect, had the tendency to fight with superior agility, awareness and skill when she was informed beforehand that she wouldn’t be given covering fire, or at times being told that she wouldn’t be observed at all, regardless of whether he actually followed through with his stated intent or not.  However, as soon as she was told that she _would_ be receiving covering fire, or whenever he even watched her fight, her combat style became erratic and careless.  Whether this phenomenon was exclusive to Lana herself was up to further experimentation, assuming he would ever find a proper control subject to make a legitimate comparison.  Regardless, the experience was an enlightening one.  It certainly yielded a more accurate assessment of her disposition and capabilities than having a conversation with her.

Certainly he wasn’t about to tell Lana of this finding.  Not only would it defeat the purpose of a blind experiment, but she tended to get perturbed by the idea of being experimented upon.  But the findings from his experimentation would not be in vain.  This was part of why he insisted on heavy cloaks.  The sun may have been a factor, but ultimately it was an attempt at camouflage.  He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Paracanis Wyrm could see sharply in low light, making any efforts at hiding from them pointless.  Rather, his aim was to conceal his position from his own ally.

Lana led him by several brisk strides, but he maintained this distance from her, lest he be found out.  For a moment, she appeared winded and stopped to rest her hands on her knees and catch her breath.  He would have to work on her stamina more in the future, but at the immediate moment he hit the ground, just in case she turned back.

His cloak was large enough to cover his full body, and its coloration allowed him to blend seamlessly into the sand.  He still managed to peek out under a low-raised corner, where he saw Lana thoughtfully scrutinize her sword.

Don’t do it, he thought silently.  Conserve your strength for the fight that matters.

Though he was too far away to listen clearly, he thought he heard Lana say something under her breath.  Knowing her usual choice in vocabulary, it sounded vaguely as if she said “fuck it.”  Something else his observational experiments on her had deduced was that, despite being an otherwise intelligent and lucid voidwalker, her use of profanity often presaged her doing something uncharacteristically stupid and reckless.

No, no, no, no, no…

In the blink of an eye, she vanished from his sight.  He didn’t have Quicksilver’s scope ready to confirm his suspicions, but the most likely explanation for her sudden disappearance was her use of Sheol’s flash step magic, which he had warned against on numerous occasions.

Tapp immediately stood up and broke into a dead run across the desert, pointing Quicksilver forward as he advanced as rapidly as he could.  “Ssssshit!” he grunted through clenched teeth.  Foreign anabolic stimulants flooded his system as he wondered to himself if he might have somehow picked up on Lana’s predilection for swearing before doing something irrational.

*-*-*

The lycanthropes seemed just as tired of this cat-and-mouse as Lana herself was, as two of the serpents leaned back at once, bellowing mighty roars before their attack.  She turned her head to see the tower-like creatures preparing to come down after her, in their minds probably ensuring that she wouldn’t escape.  As one of the two dived down at her, she darted to the side, employing just enough of Sheol’s power to ensure her edge in reflexes.  As soon as the creature drove its face into the sand, she made her move, leaping high onto the creature’s face before the other lycanthrope could catch her.  She didn’t grasp onto the lycanthrope she jumped for, but rather sprung spryly off its face as she leapt at the second lycanthrope, which had also clumsily missed its mark.

Tapp mentioned this technique to her before, that a lycanthrope could quickly be slain with little effort by driving Sheol into their temples, where their skulls were the thinnest.  Though very tricky to pull off without a good opening, this near-instant kill shot could even the odds against even the biggest lycanthrope, as Sheol could magically pressure cook the thing’s brains inside its skull while minimizing Sheol’s finicky temper tantrums.

In mid-air, Lana flipped her grip on Sheol to an under-handed stance.  Grabbing the hilt with both hands, she prepared to put as much force as possible into this downward stab as she could physically muster, and-

“DAMMIT!”

Lana swore aloud as she felt herself rebound off the lycanthrope’s scales, and she plummeted right back into the sand immediately after impact.  Fortunately, her landing was more merciful than basically bouncing off the lycanthrope she tried to impale, but the hit winded her.  It certainly didn’t help that Sheol was beginning to take its toll on her as well.  With her back to the sand and her eyes to the sky between four large serpentine lycanthropes, she lifted up Sheol to see it without getting up.  She was too sore for that.  Still holding it underhanded, she watched as Sheol’s glow began to grow dimmer.  And dimmer.  And dimmer.  Sheol had shown its ability to perform a number of tricks, some of which she had seen, and doubtlessly others that she hadn’t, but this… just suddenly losing its power for no reason… this was new.  And the timing couldn’t have been worse.

A shady silhouette approached, blocking out the moonlight above.  In her last moments of consciousness, she thought to herself that this was the end.

*-*-*

Angel approached closer and closer, her steps slow and weary.  As Angel came closer to the fight, the monsters didn’t seem to notice her, but only because they were already busy with the warrior with, on closer inspection, a sword glowing with a flame-like glare.  The warrior lashed all around her, never leaving a single direction unattended for long.  She missed the monsters attacking her by an enormous breadth, though her stance spoke more as a lion tamer as she whipped her sword back and forth through the air, masterfully warding them off, almost daring them to get closer.

Angel didn’t even question to herself the sanity of approaching the behemoths.  She was far more focused on… something.  It wasn’t like some kind of sinister hypnosis at all.  She was in full control of her actions, exhausted as they were, but she _wanted_ to keep going, even if she couldn’t possibly explain why, even to herself. 

At her best attempts to rationalize it, it was like there was a bakery in front of her, churning out sweets and pastries of every kind.  She could smell that scent in her mind, and it’s the kind of smell that draws you in.  When you get there, you’d hope that you’d get something good for the effort it took you to get there.  Not the kind of good thing that you could eat, but something more permanent.  Something fitting.  Something that would complete her.  Something that she had waited for, or to be more accurate something that had waited for _her_ for a long time.  It was like a friend, but not.  She had friends.  She knew what that feeling of friendship was like.  That wasn’t what this was.  It was similar, but also something… _more_.

And she was over-thinking it, so she stopped and just went along with it, even if she didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it.  It made _perfect_ sense to her, and that was what mattered at that moment.

As she kept trudging forward, her legs grew heavy, her throat was parched, and her heart hammered away in her chest so frantically that she thought it was going to burst out and run off on its own.  And before she knew what was going on, she was already there.

*-*-*

Tapp broke across yet another tall sand dune, with Quicksilver drawn and his eye to the scope.  Quicksilver let out a high-pitched whine as its internal mechanics, quantum or otherwise, were primed for imminent operation.

He could see the Paracanis Wyrm pack with his naked eye, but as their heads pecked down like birds he had a difficulty getting a lock on any one of them.  They seemed preoccupied with something on the ground, though their lack of irises made it harder to follow any signs of motion they may have been tracking.  He consoled himself that if they had killed Lana, they would’ve moved on, probably to close on his own position to finish both of them off.  In the case that Lana was still alive, which he couldn’t discount, he had to distract the lycanthropes to give her a chance to kill them.

_WTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTW_

Quicksilver thrummed out in a tempered, steady pulse.  The short rifle’s rapid discharges sizzled the cooling desert air and some seemed to find their mark on their erratically-moving target, but made no discernible impact.

What made Paracanis Wyrm particularly hard to slay was that the vital elements of their brains were incredibly dense, making them a small target.  Assuming one had a weapon capable of piercing a lycanthrope’s armor-like hide with a density comparable to that of a neutron star, one could conceivably shoot Paracanis Wyrm in its brain and do little more than adversely affect its capacity for recollection.  Of course, lycanthropes were primarily beasts of instinct, making them a deadly foe even with the majority of their central nervous system reduced to a quasi-organic stew.

Quicksilver had no difficulty piercing a lycanthrope hide or skull.  The rifle fired highly-dense metallic shards, small and heavy enough to punch through solid walls, but exuding a payload of radiation potent enough to liquefy and even vaporize living tissue around the wound, literally blowing a hole through the target.  In fact, if Quicksilver had a flaw against its typical lycanthrope targets, it penetrated _too well_ , to the point where a poorly-aimed shot would pass straight through the target without causing mortal damage.  Perhaps the lycanthropes were evolving to counter his methods for dispatching them.  He would be flattered if this were actually the case.

The pack continued to peck absent-mindedly at the ground, showing no adverse effects to Tapp’s firepower, or even recognizing his presence.  He would have to move to a better firing position.  Fortunately, adrenaline continued to pump through his system, and he would make the best of them, or he might as well not have them.  And so he ran, though not for his own life.

*-*-*

_Fear not, for we have awaited for this day._

Angel couldn’t be sure if she was just hearing that voice in her head, or if she was speaking it out loud.  It certainly didn’t sound like her, though sound was probably the wrong way to think of it.  The presence about her didn’t feel sinister or evil.  On the contrary, it was a comfort. 

She knew there were still monsters surrounding both her and the swordswoman keeled over in between them, but she didn’t even consider them, almost in wonder of how utterly powerless they were.  She fixed her eyes on the swordswoman’s weapon, almost completely dead of its mystic glow by now.  The metal was as dark as the night sky, not even reflecting the glare from the moon.  For an instant, it was cold and lifeless.  Just for an instant, though.

A new glow seemed to build up within, replacing the one that had died down.  The swordswoman weakly held up the sword, though it continued to rise as her gloved grip began to slip from the haft.  When it finally left the woman’s grasp, Angel found her hand wrapped around its haft.  She didn’t remember grabbing it, but she knew its name.

_Hands slow to shed blood shall be the first among those with true power._

True… ability to… to cause change?  Hands… hands that pause before killing?  One who… comes before another who comes later?  These were just a few of the concepts she could pick out of the garbled mess when she actually tried to interpret it.  It wasn’t something you could hear, and even if it was, it wasn’t speaking any language she knew of.  Instead, there was a thought, and she thought after it.  It had a simplicity that you rarely see in the Infinity Bridge anymore.  First A, then B.  No complicated explanations or justifications.  No laws of physics.  No principles of magic.  No rules.  It just happened.  And even though she couldn’t understand it, she knew what was happening.  The thought came to her with a clarity that made the rest of the Infinity Bridge around her feel like a chaotic mess.

Angel arbitrarily turned her head up to one of the creatures.  It seemed to pause before attacking, as if it doubted itself.  She remembered that feeling of powerlessness, though only faintly.  With a casual wave of her hand…

*-*-*

Voidwalker Tapp wouldn’t have believed what he saw if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes, using Quicksilver’s scope to ensure that he wasn’t being tricked by some illusory vision, and recording the sight before him to review it later.

One of the Paracanis Wyrm, a species with a ferocity and tenacity matched only by zaangr’t warriors, spontaneously burst out into fragments in a flash!  It wasn’t cut apart in a shower of viscera, nor blown to smithereens.  It looked as if it’s very atomic structure was dismantled, separating each and every particulate from every other particulate that comprised such a mighty visage.  Naturally, there were times he had flirted with the idea of weaponized de-atomizers as a conceptual theory in the field of armor-piercing ammunition.  But as he discovered, some ventures on the Infinity Bridge were beyond the means of even the most ambitious of voidwalkers.

It started with a brilliantly-bright white flash coming from the ground.  He hoped this was Lana unleashing some heretofore unknown magical attack from her sword, though it lacked its molten iron glow that it tended to resonate.  This light was much… the wording eluded him for a moment… _purer_ , both in a spectral sense, and in a sense he couldn’t quite summon the vocabulary to express.

No matter, another lycanthrope was dead, and he was now one hilltop away from seeing the sight with his own eyes.  None of the three surviving Paracanis Wyrm paid him any heed, as they began to react with violent, unsystematic movements that made targeting them so difficult.  But he was closer to them now than he was before, so he lined up his target.

_WTWTWTWTWTWTW_  
Quicksilver spat out a salvo of its lethal payload, some of which seemed to catch the closest of the Paracanis Wyrm in the roof of its mouth, assisted greatly by the angle at which Tapp fired upon them.  The wounded Paracanis Wyrm finally took notice of its assailant, but by the time it turned to face-

_WTWTWTWTWTWTWTWTW_

Eight rounds caught the lycanthrope serpent, each one placed right between its glowing crimson eyes.  Quicksilver’s targeting scanner located the wounds, which pierced Paracanis Wyrm’s inner cortex and scrambled its vital nerves before it could so much as facilitate a wounded cry.  Rather, it wheezed a mild, deflating shriek as its life’s breath seeped from its nostrils.  It plummeted forward like freshly hewn lumber, its nose drilling straight into the sand, but Tapp didn’t stay to observe the impact.  He had more pressing matters to attend to after assuring Paracanis Wyrm’s demise.

*-*-*

For all her weakness and lack of skill, Angel vowed that she would save _one_ life this day.  She felt she had a duty to do at least that much, especially after abandoning all those she _couldn’t_ save before. 

Even now, a force strode out before her, preparing a path through the desert.  The two monsters she was facing seemed to follow this force with their eyes, tensing up and withdrawing a little into the sand as it approached them.  The force had no legs, but walked forward with feet.  It had no face, but eyes that pierced the soul.  It had no arms, but had hands that could shape the cosmos.  By one perspective, it might seem invisible, almost not even there… but by another, who could deny the force standing before her?  The monsters sure didn’t, as they bore their teeth at it, cowering like cornered animals.  They knew what was coming their way.

_Will one with unstained hands proceed?_

It seemed to call her out, and she didn’t want to disappoint, shuddering to think what it would do to her if she didn’t listen.  She followed that guide, putting one foot in front of the other with complete, unshakeable confidence.  She only followed as fast as it led, which wasn’t really that fast, and when it stopped, she stopped as well.

And then she felt its gaze.  A great and terrible presence, it weighed heavy with the severity of every unkind and rotten thing she had ever done in her life, even those things which she didn’t remember.  All those mean jokes, all those envious glances, all those prideful self-righteous judgments, all those taunts and cruel barbs, all the blood of murderous rage that stained her hands, things she wouldn’t have thought about twice before…  How could she have ever thought herself a good person?  By _comparison?_   Between her sore legs and her pierced soul, she wanted to just fall to her knees and cry. 

A heavy weight slipped from her weak grasp, and all that pain and guilt slipped away with it.  She stared down with eyes once on the verge of tears and saw the sword she had picked up before.  That woman carried it earlier.  She knelt down to pick it up, her hand hovering apprehensively over it like she wasn’t sure if it would be cool or scalding to the touch.  She tapped it with the tip of her finger, and nightmarish images of pain and suffering flashed before her eyes in that split second.  She recoiled from the thing and backed away, her eyes fixed to it, wondering how _anyone_ could hold such a weapon.  Her gaze finally broke when the voice returned, calling back to her, staring at her, but with a stare that did not crush her as it did before.

_The Grave bears the stains of those who have wielded it.  Those quick to bring ruin have made it theirs.  Behold, I present to you a new gift.  Bear it in peace, that the might of Za’an might shield and comfort you in all your days._

As it spoke, Angel held her hands out to cradle a delicate white light that descended into her hands like an egg.  The air around it felt warm to the touch, but the light itself looked frail and small, like a pure candle on the verge of going out.  She dared to touch the bauble, cautious about possibly breaking it or putting it out by accident, but-

The light exploded in her hands, shooting out blinding light both to the left and right, but the blinding glare caught her right in the face.  The light rushed out like water, and she struggled to even perceive the beam before her.  She wondered if she had done something wrong, or if she had broken her gift already.  The being that had given it to her wouldn’t be pleased with her, and she wondered what it would do.

_Do not strive with vain mind, for Za’an is the power of the upright heart._

The voice almost seemed to answer her questions and concerns, even if she didn’t say them out loud.  Though mighty and fearsome, it seemed trustworthy to her.  What good reason did she have to doubt?

At that thought, a rod took shape from the light, drawing in the bright glare that shone about in all directions until it took the form of a long staff.  It wasn’t like a staff of steel, or wood, or plastic, or stone, or any substance she could easily identify.  It was like it had a makeup all its own, and even without exhaustively looking, she knew there was no other item like it on all the Infinity Bridge.  Along its length, it was decorated with symbols engraved into it.  The symbols were like letters from an alphabet she had never seen before, each letter composed of little more than a couple straight lines and the occasional curve, but it was as if the staff spoke the meaning of the writing into her mind.  Almost the exact opposite of the sword she held earlier, it spoke calming and reassuring words of comfort.

Before Angel knew what to make of the staff suddenly appearing, it found its way into her grasp, a lot like the dark metal sword had done before.  But instead of filling her mind with soul-crushing dread and despair, she felt a return of that warm, bakery-smell-like draw to this weapon that she had felt earlier.  She had waited for this.  She wanted this.  It was the power that would finally allow her to make a difference.  She twirled the weapon along the fingers of her hand, and as she did so, the staff felt like an extension of her hand, or of her will.  It was like it had left her long ago, but finally returned to her at the direst of moments, completing her.

As if snapping her out of her euphoric trance, a pair of roars bellowed at Angel from above.  The force that had spoken to her was nowhere to be seen, as if she could’ve seen it before.  It must’ve done what it had to do, before leaving her to the reality of the world around her.  She didn’t spite the presence, though, as it didn’t leave her empty-handed.  In fact, she truly wished to thank it, whoever, _whatever_ it was.  With a weapon- no…  With a _staff_ like this, what could these monsters possibly do to her?

The monsters seemed overwhelmed with a confidence of their own, as they both dove down at her.  But as she was promised, no force could stop her now, not even these.  She raised her staff high as it began to exude its light.  She could hear the voice again, or at least a part of it, as it spoke through the staff at the attacking beasts.

_Away!_

A force lashed out from the staff like a whip of invisible power.  The force of impact tore the beasts from the sand they burrowed up from, throwing them into the sky.  As they flew up, they seemed to blend into the night sky, or they would have if Angel were looking at the scene through her own fallible eyes.  By the vision of her heart, she saw two enormous hands of invisible power grab the serpents out of the air, palming their enormous heads in its grip even larger grip.

_Purge!_

The beasts caught fire in the sky, but not the kind of fire one could light with human tools.  The fire that seared the creatures was pure white, like the color of the stars and the moon above.  The beasts didn’t suffer, though.  The burn was quick and merciful, almost an explosion with how quickly it overcame them.  Their vaporized remains twinkled in the sky, blending in with the starry host.

And at that moment, Angel knew the name of the force that helped her.  It didn’t speak to her with words as it did before, but rather it was like it demonstrated its identity, as a wise adult might pantomime to a child to communicate.

_Z’vaot._

With the monsters crushed, the euphoric light began to dim.  It disappointed her a little, feeling herself slip back into a mortal shell once more, like waking from a pleasant dream.

*-*-*

Tapp couldn’t even begin to explain the surreal spectacle playing out before him, but with the two remaining Paracanis Wyrm entranced by it, he would take his chance to assess his fallen ally’s state.  After that one Paracanis Wyrm was utterly atomized, he approached forward with confidence, to where Lana lay with her back to the sand, out cold, or at least that was his hope.

He threw Quicksilver over his back, letting it hang behind him on a strap.  Kneeling down at Lana’s side, he held his right hand a short breadth from the presumably unconscious voidwalker’s face.  His hand was still gloved, though he could feel gentle breaths from her nostrils as they brushed against his exposed trigger finger. 

Tapp casually shook his head at his ally’s recklessness.  She appeared to have strained herself into full cardiac arrest, but her voidwalker’s constitution was repairing any maladies that her cursed sword may have inflicted.    He felt something akin to a knot in his intestines at observing his ally’s pitiable state.  Perhaps he would have to indefinitely suspend his experimentations on her performance anxiety.  The superfluous strain was likely wreaking long-term havoc on her physiology at this point, and he suspected that he had long since exhausted his intended field of study at any rate.

Lana slowly began to stir, her head tilting to one side as she groaned weakly.  Tapp looked down at his hand, feeling a warm touch at his trigger finger.  He found his fingers wrapped loosely around the fingers of her hand.  Her fingers curled in around his as her consciousness returned to her.  In hopes she wouldn’t notice, he quickly wriggled his hand from her increasingly conscious grip.  In part out of reflex, and partially in response to the lingering effects of his anabolic stimulant cocktail, he did the first thing that came naturally:  he drew Quicksilver and lined his gaze up along sight as his right index finger homed in on the trigger.  It was a haphazard reaction, which he had to admit to himself in the immediate instant afterwards as he lowered the weapon.  He pondered if his career of lycanthrope hunting might have trained him to respond to all external stimuli with a litany of reflexes that would prove superfluous, perhaps even dangerous, once this was all over.

It was the first time in ages that he allowed himself to even hypothetically ponder an Infinity Bridge free of lycanthrope infestation.

*-*-*

The sun began to crack over the horizon, and suddenly the night of desert got just a bit warmer to her skin.  As Lana opened her eyes, she wondered how long she had been out.  Did she make it?  Were the lycanthropes dead?  What happened to Sheol?  And the survivor she chased down?  The fact that she apparently survived didn’t even cross her mind.  She was used to surviving things she shouldn’t have.

She felt something slip from her gloved grasp, and it almost startled her.  Turning in that direction, she saw Tapp with his trusty rifle drawn, but only for a moment.  It was a picturesque, triumphant sight, proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was still alive.  No punk-ass lycanthrope was going to kill _both_ of them in one night.  She began to lift herself upright, but a sharp pain got her right in the back, and she slipped back down to the desert floor again.

“Ugh… helluva’ night…” she grunted weakly.  She tried to get up again, this time using her arms, and she managed to at least get to a seated position this time.  Before she could get much in the way of bearings, a gloved hand with one un-gloved finger reached down right in front of her face.  Despite the soreness in her back, she debated just slapping it away.  She could take care of herself.

“Morning sunshine,” Tapp called to her monotonously.

And she slapped his hand away.  “Don’t call me _Sunshine_ , Bucko…” she grumbled, straining to get her feet underneath her.

“Actually, I was referring to the morning sunshine off to the east,” he corrects her.  “The Paracanis Wyrm are all dead, but there are hundreds more, consuming this world’s very landmass as we speak.  We should evacuate immediately.  Besides-  GAAA!”

“ _TAAAAAAAAAPP!_ ”

Lana had to cover her ears at the shrill, childlike shriek, especially when she was so close.

Tapp felt himself choking as a pair of arms threw themselves around his neck from behind.  The force of impact nearly threw him to the ground, but with the direction of the attack basically declared out loud (with the emphasis on _loud_ ), it was a simple matter to brace himself.  
“Guess who?” the energetic survivor yelled over his shoulder, practically right into his ear.

Lana watched the spectacle leery-eyed.  “Did you…” she begins, utterly confused, pointing at the girl clinging to Tapp from behind, then at Tapp himself.  “Did you just _glomp_ him?” she asked, trying to avoid using that particular word.  She draped her hand over her eyes.  “Oh hell, I can’t believe I just said that with a straight face…”

The survivor was equally as oblivious as she was energetic, but Tapp managed to pry her arms off of him.  “Voidwalker Angel, I should’ve known…” he muttered disdainfully.

“Now is that any way to say hi to an old friend?” Angel replied.  “Ohhh, I thought I’d never see you again, you big kidder!” she added, hugging Tapp around the chest tight enough to cause clearly visible discomfort.

“Sternum!  Sternum!” Tapp practically squeaked out.

Lana reached forward, but pulled her hand back.  Then reached forward again… only to pull her hand back again.  She felt bad for even standing there and listening in, like this reunion between Tapp and an ‘old friend’ wasn’t something she felt she had the right to interrupt.  Maybe for all Tapp’s discomfort, he was glad to see her, too, only he sucked at expressing it.  In fact, now that she considered it, he never _did_ give her a straight answer as to what they were doing in _this_ world…  That guy was a mystery-and-a-half.

Speculation aside, this Angel girl sure knew Tapp, or at least she thought she did, what with how she called him by name so blatantly.  Now that Lana thought about it, _she_ didn’t even call him by name, though ‘hey, jackass’ did the trick in a surprisingly wide variety of situations.  Anyway, it seemed odd to her that there was _anyone_ on the Infinity Bridge this close to Tapp.  He wasn’t exactly what you’d call the life of the party, from what she’d seen.  Did he used to be less harsh than this?  Or did Angel just see something in him that she didn’t?

…These weren’t comfortable thoughts running through her head, and for no better reason than to shut them up, Lana finally intervened between the two.

“Okay, break it up, break it up,” Lana repeated, finally weaseling her arms between the two.  A disappointed Angel finally released Tapp from her crippling embrace, whether she knew how crippling it was or not.

As if she just now noticed Lana, Angel turned her direction.  “Is something wrong?  Are you Tapp’s friend or something?”

Lana turned her head away.  She fiddled with the hood of the cloak at her back, as if to pull it up over her head.  “You seem to have known him longer than I have.  Have _you_ ever known him to have a friend of _any_ kind?” she answered Angel dismissively.

With her head turned, all Lana could hear in response was a disappointed groan from the girl she answered.

“Aww, that’s too bad.  I hoped that he’d found a friend by _now_...”

The sheer disappointment in Angel’s voice turned Lana’s head right around.  Tapp still clutched at his sore shoulders, but he seemed to smirk at Angel derisively.

“Heh, told you…” Tapp drilled in with a cruel, gotcha-like grin.  “I told you _then_ , and I’ll reiterate it you now:  I have no need of friends.”

Angel shook her head in frantic denial.  “Well then you were lying _both times!_ ” she raises her voice.  “…So cruel,” she finally added, almost on the verge of crying.

Angel reached over and places a hand on Lana’s shoulder.  Lana would throw the girl’s hand right off, but she didn’t seem like a threat.  In fact, it seemed like she was about to make a point to Tapp, and for that it was worth it.  The guy needed some pretty thorough verbal ass-kickings every once in a while, especially when he got all cryptic and defensive like this.  If this girl really did know him better, maybe her words would hit him harder.  If nothing else, it’d be relaxing to sit this one out and let someone else argue with him for a change.

“It looks like you have a friend to me,” Angel began, lowering her tone drastically and pointing at Lana.  “Are you going to just stand there and tell her-”

“Lana,” she introduced herself.

“Thank you,” Angel replied seamlessly.  “Are you going to just stand there and tell Lana that you don’t consider her a friend?”

Lana scoffed at the idea.  “Pfft, hell if I care.”

“Not helping,” Angel muttered, casually waving Lana off.  “So you think you can just soldier on without a friend on the Bridge?  No one to share your thoughts with?  No one you can talk to about all your hopes and dreams for the future?  No one to cheer you up when you’re feeling blue?  No one to hold your-”

Lana lifted Angel’s hand right off her shoulder.  “ _Okay_ , this is getting a _little too personal_ for my tastes!” she interrupted matter-of-factly.  She would love to get under Tapp’s skin, maybe figure out what goes on in that twisted little rat maze of a mind he had, but she’d rather Angel didn’t use her to make her point anymore.

Angel was somewhat irritated that Lana interrupted her.  She was about to say ‘no one to hold your hand out to, helping them up when they fall down.’  It was an important point, and it was a point she’d wanted to make to Tapp for some time.  She never got the chance to tell him before.  It always slipped her mind, like it was right on the tip of her tongue.  Such brilliance always had a nasty habit of only coming to her a bit too late to be useful.  But this was the greatest thing one friend could do for another:  help them become stronger.  For a cold, logical mind like Tapp’s, building up an ally might’ve made sense to him.  She could’ve gotten through to him.  Maybe she could’ve gotten him to give others a chance, to let them see the _real_ Voidwalker Tapp, without all the guns, and without all the, uh… the _more_ guns…

Tapp turned his back on Angel.  “You’re the only one present who is having difficulty accepting the scenario.  I am a warrior, a mercenary, and a murderer.  Suffice it to say, I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, as you apparently do.”

“So where _do_ you keep it?” Angel replied sternly, her earlier annoyance now bubbling through to the surface in her harsher tone.  “Do you keep it locked up in some vault a million miles away?  …Why do you want to keep your heart so far away from everyone around you?”

Tapp thought to himself for a moment, but not about what to respond with.  Angel’s question wasn’t a question that deserved an answer.  He didn’t need to dignify her with a thoughtful response.  She attempted to make an appeal to his emotion.  _Children_ argue by appealing to emotion.  At the end of that moment, an epiphany came to him.  If she wanted to debate using fleeting emotion, he would present to her an emotion he _knew_ would silence her.

Tapp tilted his head back in Lana’s direction.  “Retrieve Sheol and prepare to move out.  I’ll attend to this,” he told his ally with all the nuance of a machine.  He then turned to Angel.  “As for you, follow me.  I’ll tell you why I keep my distance.  It seems I won’t be rid of you until you know.”

Lana had to marvel a bit.  For a guy with all the emotional sensitivity of a toaster oven, he sure could get some subtle points across with very few words.  In particular, ‘I’ll attend to this’ was one of a series of tactical code words he used.  Either he meant for her to learn these code terms after a while, or he was just very predictable.  Anyway, he usually said that particular phrase when he wanted to finish off a lycanthrope or horde of lycanthropes that she had already beaten the ever-loving fuck out of, either because Sheol’s dickishness was beginning to catch up to her, or because with a gun he could do the mop up a lot faster than her.  Either way, it was his way of saying ‘don’t bug me, I got this’.  She vaguely wondered if Tapp might take Angel behind a sand dune, shoot her, and leave her for the vultures, but even for _him_ that would’ve been kinda’ dark.  So she figured she’d just let him do whatever.

On top of all that, she had to get Sheol back.  Her arm felt weird without carrying it around for a whole three minutes.  She almost felt like she’d tip over without the counterweight.

*-*-*

Angel eagerly followed Tapp up a hill, away from Lana, who went the opposite direction.  Tapp led Angel up towards one of the carcasses of one of the monsters that had chased her out this far.  She thought he’d lead her over a hill and spill his true feelings.  If he and Lana really were closer than they appeared, she knew he probably wouldn’t have said too much right in front of his friend.  He’d be more honest on his own, and Angel desperately wanted some actual honesty out of him, especially after all this time.  Geez, how long has it been?  They certainly had some catching up to do.

Tapp was the first to speak, right at the moment he thought they were out of earshot of Lana.  “Do you remember Great Aegis?” he asked innocuously.

How could she forget?  That’s where she first met him.  He was one of a number of soldiers hired to keep the bad guys on their side of the fence.  She was a wide-eyed tourist who got tired of the same-old routine and wanted to see more of the Infinity Bridge.  The first time they struck up a conversation, they were riding in the back of some army-ish convoy truck, if for no other reason than they were the two youngest-looking ones there.  Not to mention two of the only humans.  A lot of dinosaur-looking people manned those walls, too.

*-*-*

“Don’t attempt to look them in the eye,” Tapp said to her.  “They take it as a personal offense.”

Angel took his warning seriously, immediately shifting her eyes off the scaly red goliath sitting beside her, instead focusing on the mercenary who so kindly gave her that warning.  She didn’t want to upset anyone.

Proving that he practiced what he said, he didn’t even bother looking up at her, let alone the thing next to her.  Instead, he spent his idle time fiddling with the inner components of some absurdly large and complicated laser bazooka.  He seemed proud of it, and that he enjoyed his work.  She smiled at him.  Everyone should enjoy their work.

“Hi, I’m Voidwalker Angel.  I’m not from around here.  I’m trying to get out more.  See more of the Infinity Bridge, y’know?  …What’s your name?” she asked, wondering if the techie would even dignify her with a response.

“Voidwalker Tapp,” he answered, a tad bit muffled by holding a pocket screwdriver between his teeth. 

She waited for him to say something more, perhaps tell her a little about himself, but he said nothing more.  The silence began to get awkward.

“People around here don’t say much, do they?” she asked, as curiously and inoffensively as she could.  When breaking an awkward silence, one is always wise to say something that can in no way be interpreted as offensive.  She wasn’t sure if this question was entirely safe…

Tapp plucked the screwdriver from his mouth before speaking.  “Who’s there to talk to?” he responded.  “The only ones going our way are zaangr’t, like Gr’khyu over there,” he pointed casually with his screwdriver.  “I find it best not to try and talk to them.  As I’ve heard, zaangr’t get shipped here every so often as a mandatory tour of duty handed down from their council of elders.  Babysitting us meat-sacks isn’t exactly the glory of Z’vaot to them, so you’ll have to pardon them if they aren’t on their most diplomatic behavior while they’re here.”

When Angel pictured an exciting, lively metropolis in her head, this wasn’t quite what she had in mind.

It was quiet.  It was cramped.  It was uncomfortable.  It was even kinda’ cold.  Everybody was either terribly on edge, a raving psychopath, or some kind of dragon, with the occasional combination thrown in just to make things interesting.  If only something interesting would happen, something to make her trip worth it…

KA-THUMP!  
The truck they rode in hit a speed bump, which jostled Angel right out of her seat, but left her ultimately unharmed.  The… the dragon-guy at her side didn’t seem to notice at all, as he was in some kind of meditative trance, or he could’ve just been asleep.  Tapp, on the other hand, let his screwdriver slip out of his grip, and it fell right into an open control panel he was working on.  He swore under his breath, reaching into the circuitry to retrieve his tool, but his hand was a bit too bulky for the crack that it fell into.

Angel couldn’t help but look over in Tapp’s direction.  Where else was she supposed to look?  There wasn’t much of a view, given how the canvas wrapping over the back of the truck really took away from any chance she had at taking in the scenery.  She got up and went over his direction.

“You okay over there?”

Tapp fidgeted his fingers into the control panel, but his stubby fingernails continually pushed the tiny screwdriver just out of his reach.  He pulled his hand from the device, shaking his fingers about in frustration.  “Just a tool, I’ve got more,” he responded, fishing into one of the pockets on his many, _many_ pocketed jacket.

“Hang on, can I try?” she asked.

He seemed to actually consider it.  Or it could’ve been he couldn’t find his spare screwdriver.  Either way…

“Knock yourself out,” he responded.

Angel sat next to Tapp, and he pushed his high-tech cannon across his lap until the panel rested under her lap.  It felt heavy.

She saw the screwdriver almost immediately, its shiny silver standing out against the green silicon chips.  The screwdriver had slipped between two tall chips, but didn’t seem that hard to get out.  He must’ve just had trouble getting a grip on it, with how thin it was and how close it was to the bottom.  Angel reached in, her slender hands and longer feminine fingernails making quick work of the problem.  She seized the bauble from the high-tech depths of the complicated-looking device and handed it back to Tapp.

“Thanks,” he told her plainly, pulling the access panel back over his own lap and getting right back to work.

Angel held her tongue for a moment, not sure what she had just done, but glad that she could’ve helped someone out.  In a tiny way, she made the Infinity Bridge a better place by being wherever she was, and it was something she sought to do wherever she went.  The silence afterwards didn’t bother her as much.

After a few minutes of sitting around and doing nothing, Tapp closed the panel he was working on and stuffed his screwdriver in a pocket on his vest.  It was like he had an instinctive organizational structure, not even needing to look.

“So… what are you working on?” Angel asked.

“Ah, admiring the hardware.  It’s an extremely high-yield electromagnetic radiation discharger.  I call it a positron cannon,” Tapp answered proudly, not afraid of getting into the nitty-gritty technical details.  “It’s the only one of its kind, so far.  I designed it myself.  This bad boy represents a good ten years of solid engineering.  If it works, I’m planning to build an even bigger version, scaled up to the size of a building.  I’m headed out to the Aegis for some concept testing, seeing if it’ll actually work in live combat.”

Something about that last phrase made Angel shrivel away a bit.  “…Live… combat?”

“Yeah, sometimes it’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it, y’know?” Tapp responded proverbially.  He might have said some other stuff, but Angel was barely listening anymore.

Tapp didn’t say a word again for quite a bit, instead going over some sensors and microcomputers across his giant cannon’s surface.  But for whatever reason, he spoke up.  “You seem nice,” Tapp told Angel, his voice lively as if with a quaint fascination with the thought of a nice person.  “What brings a nice girl like you up to the Aegis, anyway?”

Tapp’s words both flattered and alienated her.  She tried to be nice to everyone she met.  Apparently, she succeeded here as well.  But suddenly, it came to her that this place, Great Aegis, wasn’t just some tourist attraction.  It was a war zone.  No wonder all the tourists thinned out.  She thought she might’ve wandered away from the group or something silly.  But in actuality the tour probably ended hours ago, maybe even days ago.  It seemed like the only people who went to Great Aegis were those who wanted to kill living things, but they wanted to go someplace where killing was generally more socially acceptable.  Based on the motif of the place alone, it seemed like there was enough killing on both sides to go around.  You don’t put up watchtowers, warning sirens, and medical tents just to go big game hunting…

Angel sat frozen in her seat as the convoy presumably came to a halt.  Tapp and the dragon-man sitting across from her both stood up and bailed out the rear of the vehicle, but Angel remained.  Tapp didn’t wait for her.  The dragon guy certainly didn’t wait, which was odd considering Angel could barely tell that he was awake before.  She wondered if that was what the dragon guy thought of her.  Finally sitting there all alone, she stewed in her own thought.  She felt as if she didn’t belong there.  It filled her with shame, like she stumbled onto some forbidden realm that the Infinity Bridge had purposefully hidden from her to protect her.  And she spoiled it all with her curiosity.

Many hours later, Tapp got back to the truck, accompanied by some pretty rowdy mercenaries.  Some of them were human.  Others were of varying levels of humanoid, but passed well enough based on how flawlessly they exchanged conversation with the normal humans.  The dragon man didn’t return, though.  As the convoy rode back, she wondered what had happened.  Maybe the dragon man rode in another convoy.  Maybe he was killed on the front lines.  If so, did she really just accompany him as he rode to his death?  The thought chilled her to the bone.  Maybe that’s why this place felt so cold.

Despite the loud, rambunctious company, Angel was alone with her thoughts all the way back, and again she was the last to leave the truck.  The mercenaries that had joined Tapp seemed eager to head back to the lodging, getting away from the fighting as they ranted and raved about their kills in a grim parody of the proverbial story of the big fish that got away.  Only they were serious.  Tapp was the second-to-last to leave, rounding up his experimental cannon on a strap across his back, and that was when he must’ve seen her sitting where she was when he first left her.  She hadn’t moved a muscle in hours, and that seemed to have gotten his attention.

“Uh… nice girl?” Tapp called to her.  He’d probably forgotten her name by now.  If he really saw that one dragon man die, she wouldn’t blame him.

Angel sat timidly with her arms folded over her lap, but she turned her head when Tapp called her, giving him a weak smile.  “Oh…  How was the positron cannon?” she asked blankly.  It was the least depressing thing that came to mind.  She tried and failed to put on her cheeriest smile, and her tone must’ve made her sound pathetic and weak.

Tapp gestured for her to follow him out the back of the truck.  “We’re back at Bastion Tertius.  It’s the end of the line for today.  You want to head in?”

“The dragon man…” she responded weakly.  “Is the dragon man okay?”

Tapp furled his eyebrows a bit at her odd terminology.  She only remembered that its proper name, as well as the name of its species, was something entirely alien to her.  It took Tapp a moment to figure out what she was talking about, but he finally nodded in comprehension.  “Ooooh, you mean Gr’khyu, the zaangr’t who was in here earlier?  He’s fine.  A little bored, but fine.  You can go talk to him ins…”  He held his tongue for a moment, considering his words.  “Okay, maybe don’t _talk_ to him per se, he’s kinda’ ticked off right now, but he’s alright.  He just flew back on his own.  He said he’d meet us back at Tertius when we all decided to call it a day.”

Angel took solace at Tapp’s explanation.  She was almost worried the dragon man whose name she couldn’t pronounce had died.  It was a relief, but a small one considering the thought of his possible death still weighed heavily on her.  Even though he didn’t die today, he _could_ _have_.  Wasn’t that how war basically worked?

Tapp rested his positron cannon down at the row of seats across from Angel and he sat back down next to her.  As he sat closer, Angel could see that Tapp was a little worse for wear in ways she didn’t catch at first, like his coarse hands, dirt-stained cheeks, and the kind of sweaty funk that reeked of what she imagined testosterone might smell like.  The whole truck stunk of it.  “…Angel, was it?”

She nodded.  “You remembered.”

“You called my positron cannon by its proper name,” Tapp answered.  “For that, I should get _your_ name right at least once.”

Angel chuckled, her mood lightening, but just a little, and only for a moment.

“But you didn’t answer my question from earlier…” Tapp reminded her, single-handedly killing the mood.

“Answer what?” she asked.

“Why you came here,” Tapp responded bluntly.  “You said you wanted to see more of the Infinity Bridge.  And yet you came _here_ ,” he elaborated, as if he was following some unspoken logic that she didn’t know of.

“I didn’t know,” Angel answered, though answering a question that Tapp hadn’t yet asked.  “I didn’t know you killed things up here.”

“Well, to be truly honest, there’s not a lot to kill these days,” Tapp admitted, almost ashamed to do so.  “Most of the time there are just these occasional dark-skinned giant wolf things, but they don’t show up in very large numbers, or even once a day.  I don’t really know exactly what they’re called, even.  Gr’khyu wouldn’t answer any of us when we asked…” he trailed off.  “Most of us just call ‘em lycanthropes.  Fifty points and a beer if you confirm a kill on one.”

“You drink?” Angel asked, now curious.

“Nah, I’m in it for the science,” Tapp answered.  “Besides, I’m more of a loner anyway,” he added, oddly content with such a depressing answer, or so Angel thought of it, almost as if he was bragging about it.  He then muttered something under his breath, something sounding like a mental note about owing someone a beer, followed with a chuckle she could barely hear.  Angel didn’t recognize the name, so she didn’t pay any attention.

That unsettling silence crept in again.  Tapp was the first to defuse it.  Angel wished he didn’t.

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Sure I did,” Angel insisted weakly.  “I wanted to get out.  Take in some new sights.  Enrich my life with some exciting experiences.  See what the Infinity Bridge was like beyond my home.”

Tapp let out a short hum of disapproval, like Angel had stumbled onto something far bigger and more complicated than she could’ve possibly known about.  “And was it everything you hoped it’d be?” he asked, almost sarcastically.

Without even waiting for a response, he scooped up his positron… his _gun_ , and left out the back of the truck, leaving Angel to her thoughts.  She wound up sitting there all night, unable to even sleep.  Tapp found her there the next morning.  Of all the trucks in all the convoy, he had to keep getting in this one.  Just her luck.

*-*-*

At Tapp’s instructions, Angel laid her hand upon the fallen creature’s rough, scaly hide.

“I held strong suspicions that you would take up residence in a world such as this,” Tapp told Angel bluntly, like he wasn’t even trying to connect any thoughts.

Perhaps her memory was failing her, but Angel didn’t remember Tapp being this harsh before.  He talked with a bunch of big words, but it sounded like it was completely natural to him.  Did he use a bunch of big words last time, only she just remembered a layman’s version of the conversation?  Or…

“You saw death up there,” Angel basically whispered back.  “Is that what changed?”

“Change happens every day,” Tapp responded dismissively.  “Change is the means by which we learn.  It is the means of our growth, our evolution.  Change makes us superior for our perseverance against it… or it destroys us utterly,” he explained, capping off his explanation by clenching his fist suddenly and tightly.

“ _Now_ who’s the one not answering who’s question?” Angel objected.

“Your very hand rests upon the answer you seek,” Tapp snapped back.  “You’ve never experienced a lycanthrope raid before, have you?  You have sheltered yourself from the change flowing through the Infinity Bridge thus far, hiding so deeply behind Great Aegis in this backwater desert.  But I didn’t flee and cower, as you did.  I stayed.  I persevered.  I matured.  I _evolved_.”

“And I didn’t?” Angel interrupted, predicting the jab that was coming her way.

“You appear to know the answer to that question already,” Tapp responded coldly.

Angel knew that Tapp was right.  She went one direction, and he went another.  She almost felt bad for criticizing him.  What did she know about war and killing?  …It existed, somewhere.  That was about it.  Putting herself in his shoes, she could only imagine how tough it would be for Tapp to make friends when you never know who’s going to make it back home on any particular day.  On that train of thought, the way Tapp kept Lana on such a short leash, treating her more as an ally in combat than an actual friend was almost encouraging.  It was the way his culture expressed the same feelings of camaraderie… while at the same time preparing to let them go in case something bad happened to them.

“Did you lose anyone?” Angel thought to herself, only also saying it out loud.  She didn’t mean to.  It just came out.  But ultimately, she didn’t regret asking.  It had to be known.

Tapp was already walking away when he heard her, but he stopped in his tracks at her question.  “This world’s lycanthrope infection has gone beyond what can be treated.  My ally and I are preparing to evacuate this world and quarantine it permanently.  My professional recommendation to you is that you prepare to do the same.”

He tried to be cool and collected, ignoring her question entirely, but he couldn’t hide it from her.  Unbeknownst to him, he had answered Angel’s question quite clearly.  In fact, he answered _all_ of her questions clearly, if you knew what to listen for.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced boldly.  She wouldn’t take no for an answer.  It was far beyond her ego at this point.  She could feel it, hear it screaming out from the very depths of her soul.  Everything finally began to take shape.  The Infinity Bridge and all its cruelty finally began to make sense to her.

It was hard for her to see before, but this was her calling.  It was the purpose her life was meant for.  It was why she was chosen to carry the power to protect.  It was the reason she was so good at making so many friends.  This was her ultimate challenge, a test of everything she had learned.  Every voidwalker had one, and she now knew hers.  The Infinity Bridge might be a big place with lots of friendless loners around every corner, but she had spent far too much effort on Tapp to just abandon him now.  She was going to see this through, not for her sake, but for his.  He would never be happy if he refused to be honest with himself and others.  And if she had to defeat every evil force on the entire Infinity Bridge to bring about the peace that would allow Tapp to lower his guard, so be it.  She might have to do just that… but she could do it now.  The power that now watched over her would make it so.

It was no coincidence receiving her newfound powers right before reuniting with Tapp.  She didn’t believe in coincidence.  It was also no coincidence how this calling would bring joy and happiness to the entire Infinity Bridge wherever she went.  It seemed a bit selfish to spend so much effort focusing on one voidwalker, but it wasn’t like that at all.  If she succeeded in her task, so many other good things would happen to so many other people.  If she succeeded, there would be no more need of Great Aegis, a symbol of war and death that would otherwise last through the ages.  There would be no need for guns, swords, bombs, black magic, and weapons of any kind.  There would be no evil.  And the Infinity Bridge would finally be at peace.  With such lofty goals, it almost scared Angel, thinking that these goals weren’t actually her own, but the goals of the one who gave her the power that saved her life, and the lives of others.  She wanted this power, after all.

Tapp smirked as he paced down the dune, closing in on his ally as she reclaimed her sword from the sands.

Angel was truly an easily-manipulated juvenile of a voidwalker, succumbing to such a blatant snare with an ease that almost made Tapp remorseful.  He would tolerate her banal nonsense about friendship and the like, but on the condition that his patience would not go unrewarded.  Ah yes, he would discover the mysteries behind Voidwalker Angel’s newfound power, the power that obliterated three of the Paracanis Wyrm without a trace.  Such knowledge could wipe out the entire lycanthrope plague, if employed by one with a penchant for victory at any cost.  Perhaps, such a power could be used to defeat _other_ foes, as well…

“Of course you’re coming,” Voidwalker Tapp concluded.

*-*-*

Voidwalker Lana twirled Sheol around in her hand, trying to shake the dust off.  If she wasn’t careful, the sand would glass over, and that would be a bitch to clean off.  She cleared Sheol as best she could with her cloak, but some grains got stuck in the hilt’s engravings.  Ah, forget it and call it a souvenir, she thought to herself.

Sheol had resumed its normal glow, shining with the same hue as the rising sun.  She had become accustomed to the sword’s idiosyncrasies, things that might seem odd coming from any other weapon.  What kind of sword tries to kill its own user?  Seriously?  And even more than that heart-attack stunt, she vaguely recalled Sheol going dim, very close to when she lost consciousness.  The thought of a dimming Sheol sounded like some kind of bad dream.  Sheol’s constant glow seemed like the only constant in her life since Redeemer went to hell.  Yeah, it probably was some kind of dream.  Seemed just fine, now.

Lana looked around.  Pulling a Tapp-ism for a minute, she saw five of the lycanthropes, but she only saw two of their bodies.  The one she killed still slumped over in a heap, right next to its severed head that was beginning to smell ripe in the air.  The airborne toxin buildup from its corpse probably wasn’t doing her nose any favors, either.  The other dead lycanthrope had slumped over face-first into the sand.  Though she wasn’t there to see it firsthand, she pictured its final moments in her mind.

Oh crap!  Don’t shoot me!  I’ll be a good lycanthrope from now on!  Honest!

KA-POW!  KA-POW!  KA-POW!  KA-POW!  KA-POW!

Heh, fucker.

But still, amusing as that lycanthrope’s death must’ve been, it still didn’t add up.  How did the other three lycanthropes die?  Did they run off?  Did Tapp lure them off and shoot them one at a time someplace else?  Or… wait…  Noooo…  No way…  No way that _friggin’ little newbie_ managed to kill more of the lycanthropes than both her and Tapp _combined_ …

Oh well.  She’d probably get killed somewhere else anyway.  Surely, Tapp would send her off on her own after they quarantined this world.  No way Tapp would let such an annoying girl tag along with them.  He barely let _her_ tag along with him, and she had Sheol.  Seriously, what are the _odds_ that he would-

*-*-*

The three voidwalkers stood outside one of thousands of white stone archways along the Infinity Bridge’s baroque, endless corridor.  Each of the white arches projected a curtain of light, rippling like water and shimmering like the ocean in the sun.   Lana wanted to tell herself from five minutes ago to just shut up and quit jinxing it, all while the voidwalkers were clearing some distance between themselves and the wall of archways.

“I hate you sometimes, Tapp…” Lana remarked.

“Care to ignite the quarantine detonators?” Tapp offered, handing Lana a handheld trigger with a bright red button at the top.

“Gladly,” Lana answered dryly, snagging the device from Tapp and almost pounding down the button in frustration.

A number of blinking sensors strategically situated around one of the archways detonated immediately.  The explosions weren’t violent enough to harm any of the nearby arches, but they utterly shattered the arch they were placed on, raining down dust and pebbles as the curtain of light that the arch projected was extinguished.

Angel stood between the two voidwalkers, throwing one arm over Tapp’s shoulder and another arm over Lana’s shoulder.  “Yep, we’re like a big, happy, spectacularly dysfunctional family,” Angel remarked lightheartedly, attempting to defuse the mood.  “So… anybody up for an orange soda?”


	3. Fish in a Barrel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It has been two months since Tapp and Lana discovered Voidwalker Angel. Since then, the three have been on a campaign of extermination against the lycanthropes. All is not well though, as the group is not operating as the well-oiled machine that Tapp intended. Despite a successful recent mission to slay one of the gargantuan lycanthrope progenitors, tensions between the three are strained to the point of breaking.

She woke to the feeling of cool, fresh water against her skin.  It was rather clean and pleasant, almost unsettlingly ominous, but it was hardly a bad feeling to wake up to.  She couldn’t think of anything more.  She couldn’t open her eyes.  All she could hear was her own calm pulse.  For once, her tail felt rested and strong, ready to tear off through the water at any moment.  The air smelled particularly clear, like a freshwater bog.

Wait…  _air?!_

Her hands flew up to her face, where she felt something smooth and solid covering her nose and mouth.  Her once steady pulse quickly rose as she began frantically struggling with the pearl-like shell covering her face.  She pried at it with all her might, but it wouldn’t let her go.  Its lanky but powerful tentacles wrapped their way around her head, keeping the creature hopelessly fastened to her face in spite of her frantic efforts.  Her tail flailed back and forth as she pulled and pulled at the pearl-textured creature, but no scream would come out.  Not in the air.  As it seemed she was about to pass out from the panic, a stunned sensation flew through her body.

*-*-*

Angel raised a tightly clenched fist from the ominous red button that made up much of the console on her side of the cylindrical aquarium.  She couldn’t help it.  She just couldn’t take seeing the confined creature suffer anymore.  She _had_ to be unconscious by now, and that meant that she would at least stop struggling.  And yet, even this small act of mercy still felt wrong.  ‘Sure-hope-there’s-no-such-thing-as-karma’ wrong.

“Vital signs returning to self-sustainable levels,” Tapp announced, reiterating some obscure figures on a nearby display screen.  “Acclimation rate appears to be holding steady.”

“Acclimation?” Angel scoffed.  “This is _torture_.”

Angel held her right hand behind her back, instinctively curling her fingers around an unseen power.  With it, she could crush this inhumane prison right now.  But would such a deed really be merciful?  She knew the answer before even asking herself.  No mermaid could survive outside water until she had adjusted to her new environment.  To try and artificially speed up that process… to make another creature suffer just because you’re impatient…  Why would anybody do anything like that?

Tapp didn’t seem conflicted or morally torn in the slightest.  “I assure you, the lycanthropes would have done far worse than this.  These efforts are vital to ensure its well-being.”

Angel looked back at… it.

“ _She_ is a mermaid,” Angel insisted.  “For someone with a bajillion different words for shadow demon predator thingies, you of all people should really be calling her what she is.”

Tapp paused and hummed a brief thought to himself, as if pondering whether or not to accept a challenge laid before him.  “ _It_ is an icthyopod:  a subset of the parahominid genus with mutagenic respiratory and locomotive properties.  Does such a nomenclature meet your satisfaction?”

“You know what I meant!” Angel insisted, certain to not let Tapp derail her train of thought.  “This isn’t about an innocent mermaid being tortured to death.  This is about the war.  _Your_ war.  You think the only way to survive on this wrecked bridge is to act all cold-hearted and merciless to everything that moves.”

“That which moves can also kill you,” Tapp replied hollowly, in spite of his seemingly entirely-diverted focus.  He just kept to his work, as if answering her wasn’t a matter that deserved his attention.  “My reservations are a matter of trust.  However, such trust must first be earned.”  And on he went at his work like some kind of robot.

Hadn’t she earned his trust by now?

“Lies don’t suit you, Tapp.”

Of all the sounds, interjections, and insists that his ally had made, it was this meek declaration, almost a whisper, that halted Tapp’s actions.

“No one else is here,” Angel reassured him.  “Just you, me, and an unconscious mermaid in a jar.”

“Icthyopod.”

“Cut that out!”

“In an acclimation chamber.”

“ _Tapp_!”

For once, Tapp turned his head in Angel’s direction.  She could feel the palpable exasperation in his stare, as if he had better things to do than listen to her protests.  And so, with his attention firmly in her grasp, she decided to make the most of it.

“ _Lana_ wouldn’t take your guff lying down,” Angel let slip.  She toyed with the thought of regretting voicing such an outpour aloud, but not this time.  She had nothing to regret for telling the truth, and if given the chance she would do it again.  That is, until Tapp responded.

“Voidwalker Lana is no concern of yours.  You cannot help her now.”

All that vocabulary under his belt, and yet the first time he spouts off something she could immediately understand without mulling it over for a minute, Angel immediately wished he had just used his big words.  She hoped, even prayed that she was jumping to wild conclusions, but it had been two days since she herself regained consciousness, and yet there hadn’t even been any signs of her abrasive new friend’s presence.  If Lana were here, she would’ve put a stop to this poor mermaid’s nightmare the moment she saw it.  But where was she?  Didn’t she know what was going on?  Didn’t she at least _try_ to stop Tapp?  Knowing Tapp, and _especially_ knowing Lana… she probably _did_ try.  And in doing so, she probably found out firsthand just what happens to those who disobey the fearsome Voidwalker Tapp…

“Regarding your concerns toward my methodology, correcting your glaringly flawed assessments would consume more time than it would save.  For the time being, think what you will, but I expect my orders to be followed.  Do I make myself clear?”

Fearsome, indeed.  Angel kept quiet as she stared at the console before her.  After all, she could be next…

*-*-*

She had to be insane to even _try_ this.

_PASSWORD ACCEPTED_

Angel never fancied herself as much of a hacker.  Even if she had the skill set to do it well, going behind peoples’ backs and prying into their secrets seemed like a better way to lose friends than to make them.  People don’t usually keep secrets without good reason.  But this was different.  If she sat around and did nothing, Tapp would return to his torture chamber and put it to cruel and murderous use, proving just how soulless he really was.

She didn’t even know how she could’ve gotten the password on her first try.  It was as if she heard it in her mind, but not from her own voice.  And it wouldn’t have been the first time that something like this had happened.  As Angel journeyed with her new allies, it quickly became apparent that the Staff of Hosts had more tricks up its sleeve than just acting as a flashlight or a monster-smacker.  Moreover, it gave her a gnawing hunch that the only reason Tapp put up with her was to learn about the so-called weapon that kept saving their collective lives from certain doom.  Tapp seemed like the type who would want to weaponize that kind of power, but Angel grew far more curious about the voice that came to her.  She couldn’t wrap her mind around the kinds of things the voice could do, or how it could know some of the things it knew.

At some level, she figured that, even if she could know, the answer probably wasn’t the kind of thing that voidwalkers were meant to know, and so she tried to not lose a lot of sleep over her itching curiosity, no matter how sorely it called to her.  The situations she always found herself in tended to occupy more of her attention than she could spare to worry about stuff beyond her control.  Leave the pondering and the theories to the voidwalkers with the time, she figured.  Still, the password that she somehow knew intrigued her.  It was as if she’d heard it before somewhere, even before hearing the staff guide her.  She’d have to slate away some time later to figure it out, to satisfy that gnawing hunch.  Until then, whatever “R-Y-K-E-L-L-E” is would have to remain a mystery.  For now, there was work to do.

Atop Tapp’s ultra-high-tech mermaid torture chamber, Angel scanned the workroom.  Aside from the brightly-illuminated chamber below her, there wasn’t much light around, aside from some dormant control panels for other stranger devices that Angel really didn’t want to waste time messing with if she could avoid it.  It’s not like the room didn’t have better overhead lighting and accessible switches.  She just… didn’t want the lights on.  It made her nervous, and that was something she didn’t need now.  Angel took in a deep breath as the motorized tank lid slid back with a dull mechanical hum, exposing an open cylindrical tank of water.

Dubious of the water’s contents, Angel grazed her hand over the surface of the steady fluid.  For all she knew, Tapp could’ve booby-trapped it with flesh-searing acid or some other wickedly devious response to security breaches like this.  The fear proved unfounded as Angel felt that not only was the water clean and non-abrasive, but also slightly warm, almost tropical.  It made sense that Tapp would try to match his prisoner’s original habitat as best he could, but Tapp was always the kind to have that one unexpected trick up his sleeve.  After all, he was the one who kept telling her to expect more of her adversaries than she might think at first.  Angel wondered what he would tell her if he knew she was using tricks he taught her against him.

Assured in the water’s ultimate safety, Angel gently slipped into the tank, careful not to splash water around.  It was a tense moment that didn’t need to be nearly as nerve-wracking as it felt.  It hadn’t been this long since she last swam around like she was preparing to do now, though before she had an entire ocean to work with, plus all the time she really needed.

Once more, Angel was left to her own devices, and she had to make the most of it.  And this time, she wasn’t being chased by monsters.  Well, not swimming ones, anyway.  Tapp could return at any moment, so she still had to be quick.  And in interest of that fragile time, once submerged, she took in a great breath of water.  Angel fought the urge to panic as her lungs flooded.  Maybe it was because she did this sort of thing so rarely, but it never seemed to get any easier…

*-*-*

Angel had felt freer in these past moments of terrified swimming than she had in ages.  Running for her life across a scalding desert felt slow and clumsy by comparison, a far cry from the sleek power with which her tail fins sent her rocketing through the salty depths.  And she would need every bit of that graceful agility if she was going to lure this batch of monsters into Tapp’s trap up on the surface.

Angel dared not turn back for long, and then only to gauge how close her shark-like pursuers had gotten.  It wouldn’t have done much good to try and get a look at them anyway.  Not here.  The deep oceans were a dim place, visited by merfolk only when lost.  But she wasn’t about to put Tapp’s and Lana’ faith in her to waste.  She had to lure these creatures to the surface alive, no matter the danger.

  1. _Smite.  Smite…_



It was that voice again.  It called out to her in simple commands that eventually sounded more like a repetitive mumbling.  It also spoke a simple, reassuring aura, reminding Angel that she could simply grasp the staff out of thin air, or thin water as the case was, and fend off the monsters.  She was practically on the ocean floor, gradually corkscrewing towards the surface so as not to get too queasy from the pressure change, just like Tapp told her to do.  But at this depth, no one would have to know.  She could blame the monsters’ sudden retreat on their unpredictable and cowardly natures.  She’d probably get away with it, too.  But Angel fought the urge to accept the staff’s help.  Tapp would be pretty mad if she messed this up, especially after Angel practically begged him to trust this task to her.  If she messed this up, even by accident, he’d probably never trust her again.  He didn’t seem like the forgiving type.  Not anymore.

But that was a job for another day.

Angel could feel the water get warmer as she drifted upwards.  The sunlight sparkled off the water’s surface far off in the distance.  That distant speck of light gradually grew closer and brighter as she continued.  Angel didn’t dare to look back.  She could feel them follow after her through the water, like a gust of heavy wind.  For now, that was alright, as the light grew brighter… brighter… brighter…

The next thing she saw was a blur of red.  Another instant later, she felt large patches of suddenly raw skin tingle against the salty ocean water.  The ensuing pain was indescribable.

The suffering that would follow would be even worse.

*-*-*

Angel took in a deep breath from the water.  It was clean, this time.  And as she opened her weary eyes, she saw that she wasn’t alone.

The mermaid stared at Angel urgently, shaking her by her shoulders, though the weight of the water slowed the harsh movement down to a gentle rocking.

When Angel finally came to, the mermaid gestured urgently towards the respirator that Tapp had strapped to her face.  No wonder she panicked earlier.  For what Angel lacked in sea legs, embarrassingly so for a mermaid in fact, she made up for in knowledge of surface-dwelling life, both in the world that this mermaid came from and many others.  Too many others.

“Calm down, I’m going to get it off,” Angel spoke, though the water distorted her voice with a dull echo.  In the back of her mind, she resolved to spend more time in primarily water-based worlds in the future, assuming the monster infestation ever stopped being a major issue.  But for now, this mermaid needed her help.

Angel reached around the mermaid’s head, feeling around for the fastening device.  The respirator was fixed to the mermaid’s face by a pair of elastic straps, each fastened with a small plastic buckle.  Having been strapped to it all day, most of the water in the mermaid’s lungs was probably gone by now.  Angel thought to herself that she probably could’ve saved herself some precious time by letting the mermaid adapt back to water breathing while she did the same.  Who knows how long she was out cold?  And more importantly, when was Tapp coming back?  If he caught her now, especially in an aquatic tank designed to stun its captive with high-voltage electric shocks…  Angel didn’t want to think about it.

In the middle of letting her mind wander to some dark, violent places, Angel had released the straps pinning the respirator to the mermaid’s face.  Wasting no time once the bindings were released, the freed creature tore the respirator off and leaned back, letting the air flow out of her nose and mouth in a geyser of bubbles, much to Angel’s relief.

Unrestrained by the straps that once wrapped around her face, the mermaid’s long and flowing navy blue hair floated about in the water as if it were weightless.  She certainly looked pretty, if not downright elegant, especially for one who appeared to be no older than a teenager.  Even _if_ Angel were to get her out of here, which was a pretty big if on its own, where could such a young mermaid go?  If she were younger, Angel could have some other merfolk adopt her into their school and she probably wouldn’t even remember the move.  If she were older, she’d probably know of some other mermaid-friendly worlds where she would fit in.  As if there was ever a _good_ age to be an orphan, this mermaid’s age was likely the worst.

“Are you alright?” Angel asked.  The distortions still rang through her voice, but they were less noticeable now.

The mermaid finally calmed down, breathing about as normally as any water-dwelling mermaid ought to.  “…Thank you…  …Couldn’t… breathe…  Thought I’d… suffocate…” she spoke, though in broken fragments.  Her voice had a similar distortion to Angel’s, though it seemed unusually hoarse and weak.  She took several moments before trying to speak again, most of which were spent coughing up a few air bubbles.

In the meantime, Angel prepared her questions carefully, as well as how she would respond to the questions the mermaid likely had for her.  After mulling over her nervous thoughts, Angel asked the first question that came to mind, and one that would definitely make things easier.  In fact, it was probably the one question that Tapp himself, for all his over-analyzing habits, would _never_ think to ask.

“What’s your name?”

*-*-*

“Why does everybody think fishing is so exciting?” Lana asked, disturbing the monotonous sounds of the ebb and flow of the tide.

“We’re not fishing.  We’re on a mission of vital importance,” Tapp answered her.

“Tch…  I beg to differ,” Lana muttered indignantly.  “We’re on what’s basically a boat.  We’re sending some bait deep into the ocean, using it to drag some huge-ass fish up from the bottom.  And when it finally surfaces, we’re gonna’ tear its guts out.  Sounds like fishing to me.”

Tapp didn’t respond, either conceding the point or, more likely, understanding the hopelessness of trying to argue.  Instead, he responded with the same nervous tic he always seemed to do when things got uncomfortably quiet:  he looked through the scope on his rifle:  Quicksilver, Lana thought he called it.  And now that she had a moment to consider it, it was a rather… unscientific name for a weapon.

And so, the two floated about on that giant metallic grilled cheese sandwich of a raft, smack dab in the middle of nowhere, with no land on any horizon.  The platform was about five or six brisk paces across in each direction, give or take.  Lana knew this for sure, as she had little else to do but measure it out.  The edges were lined with a ring of inflated, bright orange pontoons, as well as a waist-high pipe railing around the entire platform, save for a single exit point.

Right in the center of that artificial slab of metal stood a sophisticated radio tower, which Tapp often checked into.  He would go back and forth between his rifle scope and the tower.  Lana didn’t even bother to ask what he was doing.  Odds are he was just as skull-numbingly bored as she was, and she really didn’t want to deal with his techno-babble right now.  Instead, while Tapp’s attention was diverted, Lana took a seat on the edge of the platform’s stairwell, right over the invitingly sparkling seawater.  She could soak her sore, probably blistered feet in the cool waters.  And Mr. Stick-Up-His-Ass wouldn’t be any the wiser.

In that quiet moment, she noticed just how worn out her sneakers had gotten.  The poor little rags had trampled across more different worlds than she ever thought she would see in her lifetime before any of this lycanthrope crap went down.  Any of their original color or branding had either worn off or gotten so faded and colorless that she had to strain her memory to recall what they used to look like.  Comfort-wise, they barely did her feet any favors anymore.  In fact, she could _still_ feel a little bit of sand in them, even months later.  A nice, soothing dip in a tropical ocean might be just what the doctor ordered.

That is, if Tapp hadn’t grabbed her arm and basically dragged her back towards the center of the raft.  He kept his hand clasped firmly around her measly bicep with all the force of a vice.  Without looking his way, she could still just barely hear him pacing his forced breathing with a nervous control.  Though it could’ve just as easily been her sore arm, she could swear she could feel his hand tremble.  When she looked his way, he let her go and turned away from her, but to his credit he did explain his actions.  …Kinda’.

“Keep clear of the water.”

It was a bit of an extreme reaction, but Tapp practically defined himself with crap like that.  But Lana knew better than to ask why, no matter how pent up all the ‘dude-what-the-hell’ inside her was getting.  Instead, he went back to his console, and she went back to… well, leaning against the railing and admiring the scenery.

But that wasn’t all that happened that day.  Oh no, no, no, no, no.  In a few minutes, she would be _begging_ for more boredom like this.

*-*-*

“Euryale.”

“What?”

“My name…  My name is Euryale.  You asked, and I thought you deserved to know.  It all happened so fast, but I think I owe you my life.”

The poor thing had _no idea_ what she had gotten herself into…

In such a cramped tube, clearly not designed for two, Angel could hear Euryale’s pulse grow steadier and steadier.  It’s amazing the things you can hear underwater.  Though interesting, Angel found herself at a loss for other words.  Euryale, on the other hand, seemed to have no such problem.

“What were those sharks?”

Angel immediately shrank away, her retreat cut off by the tight prison.

“Answer me!” Euryale’s impatience bubbled over.  “Those sharks…  They _destroyed my home!_   What are they?”

She was afraid that this question was coming, possibly more afraid than she could ever be of _any_ monster.  Angel knew that tone, even altered through the water.  This was the first question every wrathful world-orphan asked.  This was the same tone which sent countless others on their pointless quests for a vengeance that would never be satisfied, and that would solve nothing even if it could be.  In fact, Angel was even wondering if the voidwalkers she personally knew ever asked this question.

“I won’t let you fight them.  I’ve seen what battle lust does to people,” Angel warned somberly.

“You won’t _let_ me fight?!” Euryale repeated in a stunned disbelief.  “And what would you have me do?  Sit around and wait to die while those _things_ are still out there?  And what do _you_ do about them?”

Angel bit back her most immediate response about Euryale knowing nothing about anything that was going on.  She was about to answer how what she was doing was different, but she bit that reply back, too.  It would’ve taken too long to explain.

While Angel mulled over how to respond, Euryale calmed down measurably.  For a mermaid, she seemed to have a pretty fiery temper, but she’d cool down and see reason if you just gave her a moment.

“It sounds to me like you know more about those sharks than you’re letting on.  Who are _you_ , and how do you know those things?”

Did Euryale really need to know how she just barely avoided becoming the latest casualty in an inter-dimensional war by the scales of her fins?  Did she need to know that having every able-bodied voidwalker and character fight back for their lives was their best shot at surviving those bestial hordes (or so Tapp kept telling her)?  Angel began to fret, fearing that she had done little more than pique Euryale’s curiosity in a war she had no business fighting.  And that assumed she would _ever_ want to be on the same side as voidwalkers like Tapp…

“I don’t recognize you from any of the local schools…” Euryale reasoned aloud.  “I bet you’re not even from my _ocean_.”

She’s quite the perceptive one.

*-*-*

“CHANGING COOLANT MAG!  COVER ME!”

Lana circled around the central control panel, keeping Sheol between her and the lycanthrope hordes surrounding them to all sides.  They were evidently smart enough to notice how the superheated ionic bolts weren’t tearing them to pieces all of a sudden, and they were making the best use of it they could.  A couple of the creature lumbered up onto the edge of the raft, threatening to flip it over by pressing their killer-whale-like bodies into it.  A couple deft thrusts, some good old Sheol magic, and about twenty pounds of gray matter later, their bulky fins lost grip on the raft as their carcasses sank helplessly into the increasingly foul-smelling depths.  Yet it never seemed to be enough, as the horde of dorsal fins poking up from the water’s shaky surface only seemed to increase.

“How much longer do we have to hold these blubbery bastards off?!”

Tapp’s first answer to his beleaguered ally came in the form of a prolonged whistling from his rifle, yelping rounds from the short muzzle into the waters around them.  A few of the closer dorsal fins sunk into the increasingly crimson ocean around them, only to be replaced by more of the endless oceanic legion.  The creatures’ bulk at least prevented the lycanthropes from getting in close with overwhelming numbers, but such a position could not be held indefinitely.  With all the strenuous effort placed on Quicksilver to keep the creatures at bay, Tapp ratcheted a sliding pump along the underside of the weapon, launching out a smoking metallic cartridge.  If there was any condolence from this profoundly perilous scenario, Quicksilver’s endothermic coolant cells were functioning optimally under strenuous circumstances… so far.

Still, Tapp had no intention of succumbing to the horde, and so answered his ally accordingly.

“We hold here until the progenitor surfaces!”

“ _To hell with the progenitor!_   We’re getting overrun here!” Lana barked in protest, yanking Sheol’s crimson blade out of a once-wily lycanthrope’s immolated cadaver.

“Then keep Angel’s extraction route clear!  If we can’t extricate her, we won’t be able to attempt this mission again!”

“Really?  I’m surprised you give a crap about her survival,” Lana casually quipped.

“ _Secure that goddamn extraction route!  That’s an ORDER!_ ” Tapp bellowed over his rifle’s shrill, sustained shriek and the mighty crashing of the turbulent waters.

Quicksilver spat another salvo into a cluster of the sharks, scattering their formation.  Tapp quizzically lowered his rifle, noticing the scattering dorsal fins all across the horizon.  Lana was far more preoccupied with the last of the lycanthropes that dared prop itself up on the raft.  Pulling Sheol from out of the thing’s cartilaginous skull and following up with a stomp strong enough to knock it back down the stairwell and into the ocean, Lana also noticed the increasing tranquility around them.  Fins sank into the briny depths, with the occasional flick of a whale-like tail before diving.

Lana dared a smile in spite of her hyperventilation.  “Did we drive ‘em off?”

Tapp quickly dragged Quicksilver across the horizon, scanning cautiously while strafing about.  As it would soon turn out, he had some good instincts.

*-*-*

Angel couldn’t even look directly at Euryale, but with a shameful aside glance she saw what she needed to possibly explain what was going on in a way that would also warn her.  There was little sense in lying to the mermaid.  If Euryale saw what Angel saw, the truth alone would set her free.  She hoped.

Angel pressed her hand up against the glass.  The illumination from the lit tank was stark and left lots of deep shadows, but she hoped it would be enough to show Euryale what had become of the once-peaceful Infinity Bridge.  It was the end of the one-way path to destruction that Euryale seemed only too eager to swim down.  If this wouldn’t scare her straight, what could?

“Euryale, look out there.  Take a look at where we are.  We’re inside a contained aquatic tank.  You could think of it like a very small artificial area of ocean.  It’s been the only thing keeping you alive, after what happened to your world.”

Euryale glanced back at Angel out the corner of a single eye.  “My _world?_ ”  From the sound of it, it was like a number of different conclusions just clicked in her head, like her suspicions had been confirmed.  “…I didn’t think I knew you.  Just how far away did you come from?”

“Not far enough,” Angel admitted somberly.  “You can never get far enough away from those monsters.  Even for those like me.”

“And who or what are those like you?” Euryale continued to press.  Curiously, Euryale began studying Angel’s appearance thoroughly, as if expecting to find some tell-tale physical sign that she wasn’t who she appeared to be.  “You look like a normal mermaid to me…” she began tentatively.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Angel answered in a tone far lower and more ominous than any she had ever used when talking with Euryale yet, or with anybody for that matter.  “There are millions and millions of worlds besides your own out there.  My name is Angel, and I’m a voidwalker.  I, and those like me, have the power to cross between the worlds.  But as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, we’re not the only creatures out there.  And not all of those out there are friendly.”

“The sharks,” Euryale confirmed, her eyes glued and her ears attentive to the other-worldly storyteller before her.

“We’ve been studying them for a long time, trying to find a way to stop them from destroying other worlds.  They don’t just terrorize the seas, like the ones you saw.  A lot of them can breathe air and walk on land.  Some can even fly.  They get all over the place.  Those studying these monsters simply call them lycanthropes, as if naming them would somehow make them less of a threat.”

Euryale’s eyes followed Angel’s, into the dark and cluttered workroom.  She pressed her hand to the tank’s glass surface, the portal to another world both like and unlike the world of her memory.  It didn’t matter what you breathe.  Everybody wanted to keep on breathing, and that should never have been too much to ask for.

“And your friends are the ones studying the lycanthropes?” Euryale wondered aloud.

“Don’t call them that.”

Euryale paused, shying away like she had done something wrong, only not knowing what.  “Do you mean the, uh… the lycanthropes?” she whispered cautiously, as if Angel took offense to this new term she just now grudgingly used.

“Don’t call them my _friends_ ,” Angel clarified.  “And if you _insist_ on fighting this war, you only have two real options:  dying, or living long enough to become an even bigger monster!”

Angel’s fist cut sleekly through the water as if it were thin as air, smashing the side of the tank with enough force to shake the entire prison.  It was the sharp vibration in the water that first alerted Angel to her harsh reaction.  Euryale must’ve noticed it, too.  Even if she missed it, how could she miss Angel’s thunderous heartbeats?  After the impact, Angel peeled her fist from the glass, finding that the tank’s wall had cracked under the fury of her outburst.  It wasn’t enough to break the tank or anything, but the impact sure looked nasty enough.  After a few moments of silence disturbed only by the whirring of water purifiers and other heavy machinery, Angel felt a hand rest gently on her shoulder.

“You don’t want to fight at all, do you?”

Maybe it was the shark-monsters that blindsided her.  Maybe she was just getting older and wiser.  Maybe it was that, over the course of fighting the infestation, everything had gotten a bit too real, and it was all just a matter of time before she reached this inevitable point.  Though she did manage to escape the ocean world with her life, it’s as if some small part of her had been ripped out, only to be torn to shreds before her eyes.  And that she should get a lecture from some know-nothing _character_ only served to add insult to literal injury.

*-*-*

The ocean rose up as the surface tension of something colossal underneath distorted the water’s largely flat surface.  Its head suddenly broke through, sending a torrent of seawater launching out in all directions.  The wave caught the raft, tipping it up like some carnival amusement.  Lana clung to the railing in desperation, holding in her meager breakfast against the nauseating tipping and thrashing.  She could only hope Tapp was holding his own.  If either of them fell into the water, the lycanthropes would tear them apart in seconds.  And if these progenitors were everything Tapp was saying they were…

The raft leveled back out before long, but a sharp impact shook the whole thing again.  If Tapp were to ever tell anyone else how she yelped like a little girl at the shock, she’d break his spine, but more pressing matters presented themselves when she saw just what had hit their raft.  Angel’s fuchsia-scaled tail stretched quite a ways across the raft.  The human flesh on her back showed off a number of nasty cuts and lacerations.  It figured that these lycanthropes were probably way more ferocious in their natural ocean habitat than they were when trying to flop their way onto a dry raft.  And to think that, compared to Angel, she had the easy job.

Lana reached out nervously to help Angel to her… well, fins, but her feet would probably grow back pretty soon… she presumed.  Who knows how the hell these mermaids’ biology worked?  Angel’s skin was soft and tenderized to the touch, but this could’ve just been yet another mermaid thing.  What she did know was that nothing, no matter the species, should be losing that much blood.

“Hey, Tapp!  It’s Angel, and she’s bleeding really badly!  What do we do?”

Rather than answering her, Tapp kept his focus on the gargantuan sea serpent that finally showed itself, and from the looks of it, he had good reason to be cautious.

The creature before them had to be the biggest lycanthrope that Lana had ever seen in her life, though in all fairness it was probably the biggest _anything_ she’d ever seen in her life.  Its enormous serpentine body stuck out of the water like a living skyscraper, and that was just the part of it that was immediately visible.  It’s the kind of sight that really made you wonder about how little you actually matter in the grand scheme of things.  As her eyes trailed up the thing’s body, Lana could only hope that its bark was worse than its bite, and by several orders of magnitude.  But if what happened to Angel was any indication, she probably wasn’t going to be that lucky.  Was she _ever_ that lucky?  By the time her eyes finally trailed up to the thing’s face, she squinted from the bright sun also hanging high in the sky.

“What… the _fuck_ … is _that?!_ ” Lana just barely asked, her voice low as a whisper in sheer awe of the sight before her.

“That…” Tapp began to respond, bracing Quicksilver against his shoulder.  “…is why we are here.”

Lana nervously raised her weapon as she wondered if there was any point even readying herself for a fight.  If nothing else, brandishing Sheol always made her feel just a little bigger and tougher.  “So, this is the son of a bitch that got Angel?” Lana asked indignantly.

Tapp responded with his usual cold silence, which was particularly unhelpful at a time when their friend’s life could’ve been hanging in the balance.  Skeptically, Lana figured that if this really was the lycanthrope that tore Angel up, there’d be little point in trying to resuscitate her.

The sea serpent dragged its ponderous gaze across the horizon, as if it either didn’t dignify their raft with its attention, or it simply didn’t notice.  For all its size, it actually seemed pretty stupid, but such were the lycanthropes:  a million-dollar snarl hiding a nickel of a brain.

All in all, Tapp seemed to be taking the whole you-are-naught-but-an-angry-sea-god’s-navel-lint thing pretty well.  He still didn’t say anything, but he was slowly drawing his rifle, quietly lining up his shot, probably searching for weak points.  His movements seemed just as slow and deliberate as the sea serpent’s movement, almost like they shared the same instincts.  Tapp clearly needed to focus for whatever he was doing, but this tedious waiting game wasn’t doing what was left of Angel any favors, and that was even assuming anything could be done for the mangled mermaid.

“ _Hey_ , Bridge to Tapp:  we have to get Angel outta’ here, _now!_ ” Lana finally exclaimed.  An instant later, she wished she hadn’t.

The surface of the water tipped and shook as the progenitor suddenly stirred, turning its gaze straight towards the raft.

“And thus we forego the element of surprise!” Tapp shouted back at Lana before firing off a whistling stream of firepower into the progenitor’s face.

Honestly, Lana figured that she should’ve expected what happened:  a load of nothing.  The giant lycanthrope didn’t reel in pain at the shots.  It didn’t flinch.  It didn’t even budge.  Lana almost wondered whether Tapp actually hit the thing, but considering his track record as a sniper and the progenitor’s sheer size… even the thought of it was so preposterous that she didn’t even bother to ask.

To his credit, Tapp was quick to follow up his first ineffectual salvo with another stream of sparkling death, only this time he didn’t let the trigger up.  Quicksilver whistled and screeched like a simmering teapot, its pitch growing ever harsher as the relentless torrent of flesh-searing atomic bursts continued.  Furthermore, every so often, he would pause his rate of fire to ratchet back Quicksilver’s shotgun-like pump, spitting smoking shells from the weapon at an absurd pace compared to the earlier skirmish.  The amount of firepower leaving Quicksilver looked to be enough to cut a normal lycanthrope clean in half.  But this colossal sea dragon was proving itself far more than a normal lycanthrope, as it continued to just… well, float there.

And then the unthinkable happened.

Sometimes, no matter how many safeguards you have built into your technology, the technology just decides to say “screw you, I’ll break if I feel like it.”  It certainly felt like one of those moments, when Quicksilver’s ear-aching screech finally tapered off until it was little more than a dull hum.  Quicksilver didn’t look like it was faring too well, as it spewed smoke and steam out its ejection port like a car on fire.  When Tapp ratcheted back the rifle’s pump, the weapon vomited out a glowing white metallic canister.  As this shell tumbled from Quicksilver, it hit the metallic floor of the boat.  It didn’t even bounce, landing with more of a splat than a clank.  The shell’s structure crumpled up like wet cardboard on the raft’s floor.  In seconds, the once-cylindrical shell became a steaming puddle of metallic goo.

As for the sea dragon, it focused a single primal eye in the direction of their raft, slowly closing in as if trying to spot a tiny insect.  Lana knew they were found out when the monstrous pupil suddenly narrowed.

“We are _so_ fucked…”

*-*-*

Lana’ eyelids peeled open.  As she leaned up from the cold metal operating slab that Tapp assured her was just as comfortable as a bed, the very next thing she felt was a splitting migraine.  She thought that she might get used to waking up here eventually, but it was always a bit unsettling.  If it weren’t for that damned sterile smell of the place, it wouldn’t feel like such a hospital, despite that this was exactly what the place looked like.  At times, she wondered where it was that Tapp slept, though the cryptic voidwalker claimed that he never did sleep.  This was one of Tapp’s many numerous statements which Lana had called out for its sheer bullshit at least once.

As bitterly as she thought of such a sickeningly clean place, she let out a gentle sigh of relief, as if she honestly expected to wake up to worse.  It had been a hell of a day… whenever it was that she last lost consciousness.  She had no idea how long she had been asleep this time, but at least she was rested… enough.

There were no lights in the room.  There was what looked like an overhead lamp hanging over the bed, but mercifully for her weary eyes, it was off.  As dark as it was, she could still make out silhouettes from the only source of barely meaningful illumination available.  An amber glint caught the corner of her eye, turning her attention to a nearby tray.

“Huh…  I guess I won’t be rid of you _that_ easily.”

“I should certainly hope not.”

The sudden other voice sent Lana tumbling right off the table, knocking over the tray and sending Sheol clanking and skidding across the floor.  It stopped next to a pair of boots, where it illuminated the source of the other voice like an eerie campfire.

“Geez Tapp, you’ve really gotta’ cut that out!  You damn near gave me a heart attack!”

He paused.  Lana wouldn’t have been able to gauge his expression anyway with such low light, and that’s if she wasn’t already preoccupied trying to clamber to her feet.

“From what I’ve observed regarding your sword’s operational quirks, I doubt that any of your coronary maladies are the fault of my stealth.  To be bluntly honest, I wasn’t expecting you to recover your sobriety, let alone consciousness, so soon after our most recent mission.”

“Yeah, well I’m getting sick of waking up in your infirmary anyway,” Lana grumbled back.

“Better to find yourself at the mercy of an ally than at that of a lycanthrope,” Tapp posited, stooping low and picking up the dimly-glistening blade.  Its heavy metallic tip scraped against the cold stone floor.  “The Infinity Bridge is awash with foes, now more than ever.  More than you may even realize.”

As Tapp held Sheol upright, its glow projected more clearly across the room.  The place still wasn’t much to look at, aside from a couple glass cabinets, a few other tables, and a pair of doors, each with a round window.  Even then, it’s not as if Sheol was bright enough to read by or anything.

Lana turned her back to the light.  “ _Hmph!_   I may have been loopy and tired for a while, but don’t think I’ve forgotten _how_ your supposedly fearsome progenitor got whacked.  Frankly, I’m starting to see who’s the one doing the lion’s share of the work around here.”

He fell silent for a second before replying.  “You’ve entertained such notions before.  I would think that by this point you would recognize the gravity of our collective circumstances, if not at least your own.  I…”

And Tapp paused again.  Lana could almost hear the cogs in his head cranking away, processing the depth of the hole he verbally dug himself into.

“…I retain a position of ill advisement towards the course of action which you imply.”

Pretty damn deep, actually.

Lana let her arm hang slack, and when she felt Tapp slip his hand into her limp grip, she wished she had just folded her arms.  Before she could even fight him off, Tapp raised her hand and set Sheol’s hilt in her palm, finally wrapping her fingers around it.  Even after forming her grip, he continued to cradle her hand gingerly.

“Regardless of your intent, you will require Sheol to achieve whatever end you seek.  I cannot dictate your decision beyond a recommendation, but I trust that you will see reason.”

As Lana turned to face Tapp, every instinct she had screamed at her to run the ever-arrogant survivalist through with the very sword he so stupidly handed her.  No one would miss him, no one would have to know, and it would be easy.  But in that dusk-like glow, all she could do was stare at him.  Maybe she was still a little groggy.  Maybe a part of her knew that it would’ve been _too_ easy.  For his part, Tapp returned her look with an utterly vacant stare of his own.  It was like watching a stupid dog waiting to be praised for doing a stupid trick.

While she ultimately reasoned that he really wasn’t worth the effort to kill, she didn’t have to dignify him with conversation either.  As she stormed past Tapp to head for the doors, she bumped into and past him with her shoulder, only somewhat accidentally.  And yet he still wouldn’t shut up.

“If it’s any consolation, I am aware that weapon etiquette typically dictates holding a sword by its blade when handing it to another.  However, given Sheol’s violently exothermal properties, I…”

Lana didn’t even stop to listen, barging right out of the room.

“…I …took some liberties with protocol.”

The dual doors continued to swing in and out in disharmony, one door always swinging an instant slower than the other, causing the two to constantly miss each other.

“…I’m sorry.”

*-*-*

The recently-expelled coolant canister fused with the raft at his feet, while Quicksilver’s sustained ionic discharge did little to disrupt the progenitor’s nerve clusters.  From what Tapp had gleamed regarding the progenitor using Quicksilver’s scope, its neural tissue was far too large to cause meaningful damage to.  Even when attempting to use Quicksilver’s thermonuclear after-trails to sever entire nerve clusters and effectively decapitate the creature, the progenitor’s continued motor functions illustrated the ineffectiveness of such a tactic.  Revising his calculations, he estimated that effectively slaying the progenitor would require a neuron-searing discharge with an effective caliber of a freight train.

Tapp would have to agree with his ally’s rather crude appraisal of their… fornicated circumstances.  Granted, he didn’t take up this mission with such ill-prepared arrogance that he failed to prepare a contingency countermeasure.  The problem arose in that it was a complicated procedure which would require his undivided attention, but as fortune would have it, he had an ally.  Unfortunately, the progenitor had located their position.

What followed was a deafening, blinding torrent of sound and wind, so loud that Tapp’s ears only registered the primeval bellow as a harsh ring.  Saved by his own adrenaline-flooded reflexes, Tapp found his arms wrapped desperately around the railing along the raft.  Had he reacted a second later, the torrent would’ve thrown him into the water, where his paltry odds of survival would diminish to the point of statistical impossibility.  In the presence of such unrelenting winds and deafening volume, he could only trust that Lana had successfully braced herself as well.  The wind caught the raft only a fraction of a second after the sound, tearing through the bloodied ocean around the raft with the turbulence of a natural disaster.  The surface of the water racked and twisted, warping into tall tidal waves that nearly brought the raft to a perpendicular angle from the water’s surface before pulverizing it and everyone aboard with a wall of water and salt.

As soon as it arrived, the oceanic tumult abated.  Tapp drew in a large breath of air as his head passed through the wave that had nearly capsized their makeshift vessel.  His ears were still full to the brim with water, though it would be a few more moments before he would hear anything clearly.

“LANA!  STATUS REPORT!”

As it turned out, Tapp could just barely feel the vibrations of his own speech.  If Lana had indeed withstood that last onslaught of sheer progenitor lung power, he would have to confirm it by looking.

Tapp cracked open his eyes and looked back.  The sun continued to batter the raft and its occupants, drying them out quickly.  The raft was littered with seaweed, small stones, and the occasional low-order arthropod parted from its deep oceanic habitat by the lycanthrope-induced aquatic tumult.  One particularly sizable bundle of marine debris began to stir.  If he could’ve seen straight, he would’ve known what it was earlier.

Lana erupted from the silt and seaweed near the center of the raft, with one arm still wrapped around what remained of Angel.  With her free hand, she reached down to the raft and drew up Sheol, its blade imbedded in the raft right up to the hilt.  It was a clever trick, given how little time she had to prepare.  If only she planned ahead as well as she improvised.

Confident in his ally’s condition, Tapp immediately checked around.  He drew Quicksilver across the horizon, more on stimulant-flooded reflex than purposeful thought.  If the firing mechanisms hadn’t gotten water-logged in that tsunami, it would still be incapacitated on account of, by his presumption, fused discharge rails.  The repair would be costly and extensive, but a glimmer of hope presented itself:  the progenitor appeared to have vanished!  Tapp wasted no time on consulting Quicksilver’s scope to double-check his presumption.  Against such a gargantuan foe with an endless legion of minions to call upon, he judged that their collective lives could hinge upon every saved instant.

He nearly tripped and lost his footing against the raft’s ocean-slickened deck as he darted over to the central control panel.  The physical structure appeared to have withstood the turbulence, though the controls and sophisticated electronics had been buried under a layer of silt and plankton.  Tapp frantically went to work to uncover the controls, each swift pass of his hand clearing more and more of the keypad.

“Oh _shit_ , it’s coming back!”

It seemed their reprieve had expired, though Tapp couldn’t spare a moment to attend to his ally’s concerns.  At any rate, she was still armed and he, for all intents and purposes, was not.  Increasing his wager further, he chose to allocate the responsibility of counteracting the lycanthropes, progenitor included, to Lana.

“Attend to it!” Tapp bellowed.  “If I can’t get the portal operational-”

_“HANG ONTO SOMETHING!_ ”

If Tapp had spared a moment to even turn his head, he would’ve heeded Lana’ warning sooner, allowing him to get a better handle on the raft than the slick control panel as a rush of turbulence made the water’s surface tremble like a tectonic convergence.  The raft suddenly tipped up again, throwing Tapp into the railing at the edge of the raft, where he could only hang on for his life and behold the devastating majesty of the passing progenitor.

If it wanted to ram them into the ocean, it could have redirected its pathway straight into their raft with ease.  However, the progenitor’s instincts seemed to have other plans.  After passing their raft, the progenitor’s path began to arch in around them.  Its bewildering size made its motions unclear at first, but this was the same well-documented formation that other smaller lycanthropes of various genera had demonstrated previously:  circling its prey.

As the progenitor completed its loop, the raft finally leveled off, allowing Tapp to reach the control panel without risk of plunging into the lycanthrope-infested ocean.

“Hey, Tapp?  What the hell is it doing _now?_ ”

“ _Attend to it!_ ”

Tapp couldn’t monitor the progenitor visually, his faculties being far more occupied resuscitating the control panel and activating their escape portal.  However, he didn’t require his eyes to hear that ear-stunning roar once more, forcing him to glance in the progenitor’s direction with his hands clasped over his ears.

This roar was quite an order less harsh, given how the progenitor roared straight up into the air.  While waiting for the progenitor to fall silent again, he fancied a hypothesis at the progenitor’s intention.  No known lycanthrope had ever been documented to hesitate before striking, owing far more to their ravenous id than any other persuasion.  However, a more ponderous disposition could be justified if one assumed that progenitors have never left survivors before.  Furthermore, if progenitors were as maternal as Tapp theorized, logic dictated that it was most likely calling out to its young, signaling that their prey was well and truly helpless.

With the progenitor’s roar finally dimmed to a faint echo, Tapp returned his efforts to the electronics immediately before him, hunting out the glimmer of hope that he might just escape this present peril yet.  Despite Tapp’s input, the only outputs from the device were a series of buzzing sounds, followed eventually by a subtle trail of smoke, at which point he abridged his input commands down to a series of frustrated, over-handed fist blows, followed by some colorful musings regarding the terminal’s parentage.  To compound matters, dark dorsal fins emerged from the water to all sides of the raft, each one pointed squarely at the raft like arrows.

“I could really use some good news right about now…” Lana hoped aloud.  Her eyes shifted focus back and forth between the progenitor, the advancing horde, and the mangled electronics at the center of the raft.  “Oh _crap_ , if that’s not _supposed_ to be a smoke signal, I’m gonna’-”

“You’ll _what?!_ ”

Nothing that couldn’t be conveyed with a dead-eyed glare needed to be added.  However, this didn’t stop Lana’ reply, involving grabbing Tapp by his vest and throwing him to the ground with a strength that he was honestly surprised that she possessed.  Tapp leaned up as soon as he hit the deck, just in time to see Lana draw Sheol through the air like lightning.  In another short moment, a sizable mass hit the water, eliciting a loud splash and the deflating sputtering of an eviscerated lycanthrope.

“You’re a weak, pathetic _coward_ , Tapp!  To think _you_ of all people would give up at a time like this-”

“We’re _beaten_ , Lana!” Tapp responded, regaining his footing.  “You knew this might happen before embarking on this mission.  I was under the impression you knew of such risks before _every_ mission.  Did you expect our fortune to last indefinitely?  They have killed billions of our kind, and we have exacted vengeance onto thousands of their own by ourselves.  It was an admirable effort, but-”

“Take your ‘admirable effort’ and _shove it up your ass!_ ” Lana shouted back, grabbing her supposed friend by his sea-soiled vest and yanking him close, ensuring he wouldn’t fail to hear her.  As she did so, Tapp could swear he saw a brief flare in Lana’ eyes, if only for an instant.  He would examine further, but she turned her back to him, facing down the lycanthrope hordes.  It was as if Lana refused to dignify the lesser creatures, even as they appeared in blood-chilling quantities.  Instead, Lana centered her focus on, of all things, the progenitor, pointing her sword at the creature as if to address it as a cognitive equal.

“HEY, ASSHOLE!  I dunno if you can hear me or not, or if you can understand me, or whatever, but you have _no idea_ who you’re dealing with!  I’M VOIDWALKER LANA, THE EXTERMINATOR OF ALL YOUR KIND AND YOUR _WORST FUCKING NIGHTMARE!_ ”

Communication?  And not the most diplomatic communication, either.  Still, though she might not prove herself anything for the creatures to fear, assuming lycanthropes as a species even understood the concept, she was… she…

It was no use.  She defied adjectives.  She was simply Lana.  Defiant to the bitter end.

*-*-*

The dim corridor still bore the uniquely profound stench of blood, sodium and fish carcass, masked only by time.  It was a corruption so foul that Tapp feared the reeking odor might hang in his workshop until the day that the Great Aegis itself would finally erode away.  Still, he would not compromise this place’s security for pleasantly-breathable air.  He wondered to himself for a moment how he could spend such cognitive effort focusing on something as mundane as the smell of his typical work environment.

At times such as these, there were worse things to dwell upon.

Without the weight of a rifle strapped across his shoulder, he often found himself overcompensating with the strength of alternating strides.  As he confirmed after the mission, repairing Quicksilver would indeed require replacing its discharge rails, though he would not be able to leave his sanctuary in such disarray, particularly in the middle of such a critical experiment.

In the interest of confirming the result of said experiment, he quietly slid open a nearby door, peering in.  A pale white light exuded from the room, disorienting his eyes for a moment.  The light proved little, however.  The continued functioning of the acclimation chamber proved either that his secondary ally was either considerably more tactful or considerably less brazen than he had hypothesized.  Under less recent circumstances, the result would matter little, though.  More recent circumstances had placed a far greater importance on his beta contingency.

He dared to hope that she might not prove herself a disappointment.  He once dared a similar hope in his alpha contingency.  And look how that turned out.

*-*-*

_He approaches…_

The Staff’s voice startled Angel, throwing her clear out of her contemplative stupor.  And when it called, she knew that she had run out of time.  And now he… _it_ was coming for them.  Angel would be dead before she’d allow Euryale to meet the same fate as Lana.  Unfortunately, the approaching monster seemed like he would have no problem obliging.

When the two mermaids were that close to each other, there was no way that Euryale didn’t see the fear suddenly appear in her eyes.  Even with the Staff of Hosts protecting her, Angel still had to respond to the incoming threats.  If she didn’t respond fast enough, or if she refused to respond at all, like that last mission…  That coarse skin.  Those jagged teeth.  How she survived last time, and without a scratch on her at that, she thought she’d never know.  And now, something even more dangerous and terrifying approached them.  To think Euryale even had the nerve to ask Angel why she hated to fight:  you always wind up facing something that can leave a mark on your memory, even on your very soul, just by showing up.

She was afraid it would come to this, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t prepared herself for it.  Unfortunately, despite psyching herself up for this essentially inevitable encounter, she hadn’t expected to have to face this fight in the form of a mermaid.  Even if she were to leap right out of the open tank, it could take her several helpless minutes of suffocating and flailing around before she could get air-breathing again, let alone walking around on her feet and defending herself.  And that was for a voidwalker.  Euryale wouldn’t stand a chance.

“Well played, Tapp…” Angel muttered.

“Tapp?” Euryale asked quizzically, overcome by dreadful anticipation if for no other reason than Angel’s own dread making her think that she should.

Angel glanced straight up, seeing the top hatch of the tank still slid back, just where she had left it.  If she was going to make her move, she would have to do so now.  Legs or no legs.  If not, who knows what horrible thing he would do to the two of them?  Maybe Angel had a chance to redeem herself yet, if only to save _one_ mermaid from a torturous death.

“I _used_ to think he was a friend…”

*-*-*

This roar was unlike any other the creature had made before.  It was not a bellow of triumph.  It was not a call of arrogant surety from a position wherein one could not possibly perish.  It was a squeal of denial, of disbelief.  Welts and lesions appeared across the creature’s abyss black skin, each growing wider and wider to reveal a very mortal ichor beneath the surface.  No two wounds or lashes seemed to be drawn in the same exact direction, as if each and every slash had come from a different angle.  As long and as high as it coiled, no region of the progenitor’s flesh would escape unscathed.  No single swing of a sword, not even Sheol, could cause such harm on its own.  Or so Tapp had thought.  It was as if Sheol was simply fabricating new abilities on the spot, just to spite his attempts to catalog said abilities.

The wounds did not cease upon breaking the skin.  Instead, the cuts reached even wider and deeper into the creature.  As two or more of the gaping lesions would intersect, large portions of flesh and muscle would fall from the progenitor’s body, staining the ocean with a life-blood so rich and potent that the sudden rush of iron on the wind overpowered the very salt of the ocean.

As pronounced as the destruction before him was, Tapp spared a moment to glance towards a fiery pillar of energy at his side, ablaze with enough thermal intensity to induce and subsequently vaporize his perspiration within moments.  At the base of the pillar was the wounded Angel, though such a description proved less and less appropriate by the second.  Mortal wounds and flesh wounds alike peeled off of her like molting skin, leaving behind only pristine, rejuvenated tissue.  Each detached wound, abrasion and imperfection dissolved and merged into the column of raw power above her.  By sheer appearances, it was as if Angel’s cumulatively-incurred maladies were being siphoned off, only to be reapplied to the progenitor.  Such a thing _sounded_ completely absurd, even ludicrous, though such bywords were often apt descriptions of a number of Sheol’s idiosyncrasies.  Of course, further testing of such unforeseen ability would be required before such a feat could be depended upon with any modicum of reliability, though even Tapp’s sanity would strain to agree to the purposeful replication of such unenviable circumstances.

His eyes followed the lofty conflagration straight into the air, where Lana presumably hovered, though he couldn’t confirm this on account of that sector of the sky shining out with a candela comparable to that of a sun.  Though Tapp shielded his eyes from the potent flare that had overtaken his ally, he thought amidst an instant of squinting that he witnessed Lana’ silhouette being borne aloft by a pair of flaming frameworks that appeared to take the rough shape of wings.  Such a sight called to mind the zaangr’t accounts of eras eons beyond even the Old War, wherein the zaangr’t walked shoulder to shoulder alongside beings of such unmatched power of will that they blurred the line between remote plausibility and utter fantasy.

As Tapp returned his focus to the howling remnant of the progenitor, the countless devastating slashes reached the creature’s very skeleton, leaving only a towering framework of crimson, ivory, and suffering.  For a moment, the mighty progenitor appeared like the visage of an extinct paleo-titan of a pre-humanoid era, but the spectacle would not endure.  The wounds proceeded deeper, poised to cleave the creature into countless fragments until a merciful series of strikes burrowed into the creature’s skull, culminating in a triumphant and visceral decompression of lycanthrope brain tissue and skull particulate.

*-*-*

Given the circumstances, Tapp was easily able to suppress a smile, despite noticing how the motorized hatch of the acclimation tank had been shifted aside.  He could certainly use the good news of _something_ going as planned after his recent run of near-fatal misjudgments.  Before even reaching the central point of the workroom, he would be confronted by another misjudgment.

One of the icthyopods launched itself from the tank like a mortar round, a fuchsia blur of scales tearing out of the surface of the placid tank water.  By the time his adrenaline injectors registered a fight-or-flight query, Tapp found himself pinned to the ground, the Staff of Hosts pressed against his throat.  If he could breathe, he would be rather proud of his new alpha contingency’s sudden realization of a warrior’s valor.

“LEAVEHERALONE!” Angel blurted, though Tapp could barely distinguish one word from another on account of a sudden headache and loss of fine motor coordination, making the entire statement come off as more of an unintelligible, guttural utterance.

As Tapp got a better bearing of his surroundings, he slipped his hands under Angel’s staff, using the ground as leverage to push her off, but she rammed the staff into his throat once more before he could get a solid grip.

“ _LEAVEHERALONE!_ ”

Though the blow was both winding and uncharacteristically fierce, Angel was hardly a lycanthrope, much less a progenitor, and Tapp still knew of some methods to dislodge humanoid assailants.  Some of his methods were even non-lethal, including one that Angel had left herself foolishly susceptible to.

Angel had little time to react when Tapp grabbed the foot that she had pinned his chest down with, and even less time to react when Tapp sharply twisted her ankle a full right angle off center, pressing towards a 180-degree reversal.  It didn’t stop her immediately, which itself spoke of a remarkable level of tenacity, but it shifted her attention enough to get her to let up her staff and readjust her position to where she rested her stomach over a pair of combat boot soles.  In short order, she found herself flipped onto her back, launched several feet away.

Tapp caressed his beaten throat, feeling his artificially accelerated pulse from his jugular vein in the process.  Naturally, he reached a vertical base first.  Though he strove for a non-lethal countermeasure, he had enough mistrust of magic weapon users that he wasted no time in kicking Angel’s weapon across the room and pinning her shoulder to the floor with his boot.  Her amateurish fighting had become acutely tenacious in such a short period of time, as if Angel had figured out precisely what Tapp wanted her to know.  Perhaps he should’ve been less forthcoming with the security code to unlock the acclimation chamber.

“I… I know… what you’re planning…” Angel muttered, almost as if to precisely answer Tapp’s suspicions.

Tapp’s gaze wandered.  Angel would’ve seen the pride in his eyes in an instant, even without her weapon’s omniscient patron.  “Frankly, I would be disappointed if you _hadn’t_ discerned my plan by now.”

“And now… you plan… to kill me, right?”

Or not, apparently.

“And then… then you’re gonna’ kill Euryale… just like you _killed Lana!_ ”

For all her insolence, or more likely in demonstration of said insolence, Lana would often chastise his fatally-deficient communication skills.  However, such a miscommunication proved fortunate, as neutralizing a voidwalker icthyopod capable of manipulating the fabric of the Infinity Bridge with a thought would prove a feat far beyond even his own prodigious talents… for the time being.  With a quizzical tilt of his head, Tapp released his pressing boot from Angel’s shoulder.

*-*-*

“ _LAAANAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!_ ”

Tapp didn’t think he was capable of a yell so loud as to render his voice a mere squeak, though that could’ve simply been an auditory illusion brought upon by the continued ringing in his ears.  He leaned up to the railing of the raft, reaching desperately over the edge to the center point of a rippling wave.  Lana never mentioned any inability to swim when asked.  Why wasn’t she floating back up to the surface?  Was this another act of Sheol, to bury its wielder in the ocean?  To leave those under lycanthrope siege defenseless without its awesome power?  To spite him one last time by dragging its only known wielder to her death?

Damned sword.  It wasn’t supposed to end like this.  Not this way.

“…Lana, I _order_ you to come back!  _I order you!_   And you will _not_ disobey my direct order!  Do you hear me?!” Tapp yelled at the foaming ocean.

*-*-*

Not wasting a single instant, the misguided voidwalker sprung right to her feet.  Rather than manually reacquiring her staff from the ground where it had been knocked some distance away, she simply whisked her hand through the air and the staff materialized in her grip.  Tapp posed a split-second hypothesis that the Staff of Hosts, or more likely its power, answered to some form of telepathic invocation.  Angel clearly knew that her staff was capable of a number of remarkable feats.  Tapp wondered if Angel realized a particularly innovative and heretofore unknown ability that she herself had just performed through the staff’s power.

“You should’ve finished me when you had the chance, you _monster!_ ”

As badly as Angel’s recent outburst stung him, he lacked the time to address any of his inner concerns to the depth that they demanded.  Such concerns did, however, stall his reflexes for just a moment, leaving him with far less time than he should’ve had to react to such a blatant stroke from Angel’s staff.  Angel made the most of her weapon’s length, sweeping wide and leaving Tapp little choice to avoid the onslaught other than to hit the ground and avoid its path of-

_SMASH!_

The glass wall of the nearby acclimation chamber ruptured violently, allowing its waters to rush over him and spill across the lab.  This was _not_ a timeframe conducive to his best ideas…

*-*-*

Numerous waves pummeled their tiny raft as fragments of the slain progenitor fell into the ocean, rippling the water violently with their mass.  Tapp held onto the raft’s railing as tightly as he could to ride out the waves.  If there was one thing about dying in combat to the progenitor, it was that it had an unalienable dignity to it, even in the harshest mismatch.  But what honor was there in being pulverized by necrotic lycanthrope remnants?

As Tapp continued to clutch the railing, he caught a glimpse of an intriguing spectacle occurring on the water’s surface.  The once coordinated, single-minded lycanthropes lunged at one another, biting and tearing at one another’s flesh in an unrestrained orgy of violence as far as the eye could see.  This was the creatures’ natural state without their progenitor, as if the progenitor exuded some pheromone to control the lesser creatures, or if base instinct compelled the smaller Paracanis Carcharodon to defend their genome’s ancestor, superseding all other instincts.  However, upon closer scrutiny, such a seemingly typical scenario for a Carcharodon school proved far more unique than any previously documented lycanthrope behaviors.

Tapp remembered the colossal size of the Paracanis Carcharodon from before, particularly when they would lumber out of the water and attempt to capsize the raft, and those accounts clashed with his present observations.  Tapp paid specific attention to a trio of the lycanthropes that tore at and fought over a fragment of the progenitor’s carcass near to the raft.  At first, he thought that the mass of steam he was seeing from the scene was coming from the progenitor’s remnants, but in actuality it was coming from the lycanthropes themselves.  Or, to be more strictly accurate, the steam came from the seawater immediately surrounding the lycanthropes, which evaporated away at their very touch.

Tapp seized the incapacitated Quicksilver from across his back.  Though the weapon itself was of no further use, its scope could verify a growing suspicion.  Through the infrared filter, all he could immediately see was a bright white blur wherever there was a lycanthrope, as if the creatures exuded magma-like heat.  At this discovery, Tapp’s first thought was not why, but how.  He knew that the lycanthropes boasted an incredibly disproportionate mass to their volume, likely owing to what he surmised as a darkmatter hide.  The design of his weapons nearly owed the whole of their ethos to employing various means to overcome this natural defense.  If something happened that were to destabilize the means by which such natural armor is held together, such as the unprecedented slaying of a progenitor, it could cause behaviors such as this, even across the entire genus.

Perhaps this was the knowledge he had sought.  This might possibly even be the information that _he_ was looking for.  Intriguing.  Perhaps the beast was telling the truth after all.

*-*-*

The monster may have been soaked from head to toe when her swing missed… but at what cost?

“ANGEL!”

The entire tube broke away, sending Euryale tumbling to the floor along with all that water.  As the deluge spread across the entire lab like a giant puddle, Euryale flailed uncontrollably against the exposed air, particularly grasping at her throat and letting out disturbingly shallow breaths.  Euryale reached out, desperate for some kind of help, _any kind_ of help, but Angel was frozen in place.  Her hands trembled, wobbling to the point where the Staff of Hosts didn’t as much slip from her grip as it ceased to exist altogether, vanishing back into thin air.

“ANGEL!  DO SOMETHING!”

Even as the monster kept shouting back at her, Angel could see the exasperated look on Euryale’s twisting face, imagining that she was making the desperate pleas that she kept hearing.  She reached out to her with one hand, using the other to drag herself weakly across the floor.  Unable to pull herself even a full arm’s length, she flopped stomach-up and thrashed around, screeching like a wounded animal.  Pleading.  Suffocating.  And yet, the more she cried out to her only hope of rescue, the more firmly Angel stood.

“DON’T JUST STAND THERE!  IT’S DYING!”

She wanted to do something.  She really did, even if it meant doing what that fiend wanted.  Why couldn’t she move?  Was she just afraid?  Of what?  Of saving Euryale’s life, only to see her-

Oh no…

She shook her head.  “I’m sorry…  I have to…” she whispered

What was she saying?!  That wasn’t what she wanted to say!  What was going on here?!

_Help… me…_

*-*-*

Tapp’s focus was shaken when the raft suddenly tipped up from an impact behind him.  For an instant, he had forgotten how Quicksilver had been incapacitated, and his finger fell upon the trigger before he could even place his target.  A low hum that built up and fell without incident reminded him of his weapon’s malfunctioning status.

The dark-skinned lycanthrope that leaned into the raft did not take the form that the Paracanis Carcharodon did, though this form could be more of a decayed state of the mutation after a considerable exothermic release.  Such a hypothesis seemed likely, given the creature’s webbed hands, each digit terminating in a claw sharp and strong enough to put holes in the steel raft as it crawled from the sea.  As opposed to the surrounding lycanthropes, the creature appeared like a black-skinned humanoid female, or so Tapp surmised until it pulled its lower half from the murky, bloodstained ocean.

Lo and behold, as if from some ancient classical mythology, the creature had the lower body not unlike that of a scaled dolphin.  Were it not for Voidwalker Angel’s similarly-formed incapacitated carcass already on the deck, such a sight would’ve seemed preposterous and fantastic.  Granted, it was certainly shaping up to be one of _those_ days.

The creature stared at him with dark, full irises, studying him as her snarling hyperventilation deescalated down to a more humanoid breathing pattern, though still one of great labor.  Its skin tone gradually sank from a midnight black to a dark purple, as whatever mutation had consumed it seemed maintained solely by inertia after the progenitor’s demise.  All the while, it crawled further and further onto the ramp, forcing Tapp back towards the guard rails.  Reaching the rails, realizing the tumultuous frenzy of mutating lycanthropes surrounding him, and having no intention of losing his life to a creature so pathetic, Tapp reached under his jacket and grabbed one of his less-oft used devices, but one certain to get the creature’s attention.

The handgun’s artfully-polished chrome reflected the overhead sunlight with the efficacy of a mirror, rendering its hard sight worthless in the bright sunlight, though it would make little difference.  With a barrel that long, and given how far he had to hold it from his torso to avoid its concussive recoil, the flailing icthyopod might have been a mere arm’s length away from the end of the barrel.  At such a close range, and with such a heavy firearm, Tapp spared greater concern that the upcoming round would pierce the ex-lycanthrope, the raft’s floor, _and_ one of the pontoons.  Still, it was his last recourse.

*-*-*

Tapp shook Angel’s shoulders back and forth, or so he attempted.  An unseen force prevented him from as much as laying hands on her shoulders.  It was a similar sensation to electromagnetic repulsion, the resistance growing exponentially stronger as proximity increased.  Still, whatever force had overcome her, Tapp was confident that it could be beaten.  If the Paracanis Carcharodon managed to overcome this force, then reason stood that he could do likewise.

In desperation, Tapp attempted to shoulder-tackle Angel, but was launched back by the repulsive force protecting the voidwalker.  As Tapp skidded across the water-slicked floor, he surmised that Angel’s power wasn’t susceptible to brute force.  He struggled to get to his feet on account of the puddle that had spread from one end of the room to the other.  Slipping backwards, his palms fell on the serrated glass that had not broken off the acclimation chamber at Angel’s assault.  Water continued to pour from it in small trickles, now mixed with trace amounts of his blood, which linked the room-spanning puddle to… the solution to his conundrum.

Tapp had an epiphany:  it wasn’t the force of the lycanthropes that broke through the power safeguarding Angel at all.

He dragged himself to his feet, using whatever surface of the acclimation chamber he could grab onto, including more ridges of broken glass.  He might have flinched off this, but enough adrenaline was pumping through his system to override any reactions to pain.  In fact, as he spied a large red button with a white lightning bolt insignia emblazoned on it, he would put his adrenaline injectors, and in fact his very body, to the test.

“Let’s see you repel THIS!”

His fist fell upon the button with the weight of his whole body.  He could feel every muscle that comprised him surge with a sudden powerful shock before blacking out.

*-*-*

Showing no concern to Tapp’s firearm, the wild icthyopod sunk its darkmatter-tipped digits into the very steel of the raft, flailing at it repeatedly.  It slashed at the metal again and again, like it was trying to burrow through it.  If it was trying to sink the raft, a simple slash across the pontoons would likely suffice, and would be far more conducive to a lycanthrope’s feral tendencies than frantically tearing through metal.  In fact, the only reason Tapp didn’t fire on the creature as soon as it started tearing at the raft was that, from that angle, he likely would’ve put a hole in one of the pontoons himself.  And so, for the moment, he watched it.  Studied it.

The ravenous creature finally tore a long, four-fingered gash straight through the steel.   The seam glowed white, as if cut open with a blowtorch.  With a strength that (at this point in its deterioration) defied its size, the lycanthrope then pulled at both sides of the metal, widening the hole.  It warped the steel as if it was mere sheet aluminum, prying it away and exposing the dingy, crimson-tainted ocean on the other side.  When it finished, the lycanthrope let out an exasperated, panicked roar before flopping over.  It would occasionally twitch about, but it appeared to have succumbed to asphyxiation.

Perhaps the creature had the wherewithal to rip a hole in the raft to allow its brethren easy access to its prey.  Except that it _had_ easy access.  With all the time it had, it could’ve dragged itself over to him and wounded him, if not outright kill him.  And yet it spared its last few moments to tear a hole in the raft?  How peculiar…

At any rate, confident that the icthyopod had breathed its last, Tapp shifted his aim and his attention to the gaping wound in the raft’s surface.  Sunlight reflected off the exposed, lighting it a bright red.  Eventually, the shimmer gradually grew into a bright, fiery orange, though it was so gradual that Tapp barely noticed.  What finally got his attention was the realization that the source of the light shining from the water was not reflected sunlight, but rather a source of light under the water’s surface.  A source that continued to float closer and closer to that hole in the raft until it broke the water’s surface.

“LANA!” his voice cracked, overjoyed for Sheol’s return.

*-*-*

Euryale wobbled forward with amateurish strides, saved from a nasty trip with the support of a nearby railing fastened to the wall.  After an adolescent’s lifetime spent almost entirely in the water, the very concept of these so-called stairs was entirely foreign to her.

Angel seemed only too eager to spring to Euryale’s side to help her up, but she was stopped when she felt Tapp’s hand on her shoulder.  She glanced back at Tapp, pleading with her eyes, only for Tapp to reply with an unflinching stare and a gentle shaking of his head.

“Are you sure about this, Euryale?” Angel asked uncertainly.  “I was hoping that, after all you’ve been through, you wouldn’t be so eager to do something reckless.”

Euryale turned back to the stairwell, ready to give the uncompromising jagged stone hill a second try.  “Reckless?  Probably.  But if it were easy, _anybody_ could do it.  Those sharks aren’t going to leave people alone out of the goodness of their hearts.  And at this point, what do I have to lose?”

It was at this point that Tapp judged that his intervention would prove the most beneficial.  He paced past Angel, heading straight for Euryale while reaching into his jacket for something.  “Considering you can barely walk, there’s no sense making your task any more difficult than necessary.  Take this.”

Finally, Tapp pulled a thin, rigid slate from his jacket and held it out to Euryale.  She wasn’t sure what to make of it, but she took one hand from the railing and grabbed it anyway.  It was smooth and inflexible, but not stone, coral, or even shell.  It felt made of something else entirely, like some alien alloy.  For a particularly chilling thought, it felt a lot like that creature that latched itself to her face and nearly suffocated her earlier.  She shivered for an instant, but was confident that such a small slab, even if it was a similar animal, would be unable to hurt her.

When she examined the object she was given more closely, it seemed otherwise unremarkable.  The only thing that stuck out was a black strip running across the top of one of the long edges.  What would something like this be for?  What did it do?  Was it some kind of magical artifact?  Was it an ancient, arcane weapon of some sort?  No matter what angle she tilted it about, it gave no response.

“What… what is this?” she finally asked.

“You seek to attack the lycanthropes, thus vindicating your world.  Am I correct?”

Euryale wondered at what he might be eluding to, that this thing really was some form of weapon.  And so she asked again.  “While I respect the help… you expect me to fight back with _this?_ ”

“Not directly,” Tapp answered, pointing to the device.  “You hold in your hand the keycard that locks and opens the doors of this facility.  Within the walls of this modest base are the weapons that I have developed for use against the lycanthropes.  However, my ally and I are soon to depart this place for the last time, and anything we leave here is left to you, either to use yourself or to allocate to your own allies as you see fit.”

“Wait, what?”

It had been a bit since Angel last spoke, but Tapp’s declaration seemed to be as much news to her as it was to Euryale.  Still, Euryale was grateful for the gesture, even if she didn’t understand how she was supposed to use this ‘key-card’.  She examined the card again while Angel pulled Tapp aside.

*-*-*

Angel didn’t have to exert herself much to drag Tapp back into his workshop, as he followed her with only the slightest dragging at his wrist.  When they had left Euryale on the other side of the door, Angel ensured that the room had been sealed before turning to face Tapp.

Tapp folded his arms before her.  “There is something you seek to inform me of in private?” he asked.  “I trust you recall our rather inflexible budget of time that we are presently operating within.”

“Your ‘budget of time’ can _wait for five minutes!_ ” she yelled at him.  “What is wrong with you?  You nearly have that poor thing killed, and now you want to _arm her_ to fight more monsters?!”

Tapp refused to respond, tapping his fingers against his elbows impatiently.

“Well?!”

“That was it?” Tapp asked plainly.  “I must admit, I fail to follow your logic when it terminates so prematurely.  It is as if you assume that bearing weaponry shares congruency with individual suffering, when in reality the _contrary_ is far closer to the truth.”

“In _English_.”

Tapp points roughly off in the direction where the two had left Euryale.  “Why would I spare extensive effort to save that creature’s life, only to leave it defenseless?”

“ _HER!_ ” Angel insisted, amazed that she still needed to say the same thing over and over again.  “Do you _honestly_ not recognize a living, breathing _human being_ when you see one?”

“Icthyopod.”

“ _In an acclimation chamber!_ ” Angel added, spoofing Tapp’s masculine deadpan.

“I thought this lecture was in reference to providing munitions to a lycanthrope survivor, not my personal idiosyncrasies,” Tapp presumed aloud.  He stepped towards her, purposefully straying into her personal space.  “This has nothing to do with that creature, does it?”

Angel turned her head aside, not giving Tapp the dignity of eye contact.  “ _You’re_ the one who can’t get her gender right.  You tell me.”

Tapp turned away and paced a comfortable distance away.  And as this distance grew, Angel’s boldness increased.

“You never called _Lana_ an ‘it’…”

No sooner did Angel utter those words did Tapp immediately turn back to face her.  In an attempt at intimidation, he backed her up to the wall and slammed his fist against the wall, right next to her head, but Angel didn’t flinch.  Angel could still smell the blood and salt in his clothes.

“You also need a shower.”

“Shut your articulation hole.”

“Or what?  Or you’ll do to me what you did to _her?_ ”

“Would that you were as fortunate as she was!”

“Oh, so I guess we’re talking about Lana now?”

“And if you continue stalling me, then such idle conversation will be _well and truly wasted!_ ”

“…”

“…”

Angel didn’t have much to say to Tapp at the moment.  He didn’t seem to have anything else to say to her, either.   Instead, he turned his back to her and went over to one of the room’s many tables.  This particular table had plenty of guns on it, of course, but they all looked the same to Angel.  Naturally, Tapp got straight to work.

“I suggest you pack whatever weaponry and / or equipment you can comfortably carry,” Tapp instructed in the midst of his own work.  “In your case, I recommend focusing your arsenal around an extreme-range combat doctrine.  You seem the type likely to react squeamishly to visceral blowback.”

Angel steadily wandered over to where Tapp was working, if only to satisfy a tiny curiosity as to what he was doing. Since Tapp had broken the silence, Angel felt a little bolder in responding.  “Weird.  _You_ seem like the type to react squeamishly to other people touching your stuff.”

“Are you going to approach this with the dignity and gravity it demands, or not?”

Angel froze up at Tapp’s blunt reply.  “Uh…”

“Or do you intend to entrust your self-defense to the fallible, unpredictable Staff of Hosts?”

Angel glared at Tapp out the corner of her eye.  “The Staff of Hosts is _not_ unpredictable,” she asserted confidently, though with the hidden hope that the Staff wouldn’t later make a liar out of her.

“Is that so?” Tapp replied matter-of-factly.  “Given your assertions, and for the sake of accounting for recent unforeseen occurrences, permit me to inquire what it was doing commandeering your consciousness a brief while ago.”

Angel grimaced, wondering how best to answer such a delicate question.  To be completely honest, she wasn't all that clear on what was happening at the time, or at least at first.  And when she finally figured it out…  Well, there was really no sense in lying at this point.  After asking and asking and asking every little question that came to her mind, only to chide Tapp for being so cryptic with his answers, she wasn’t about to make a hypocrite of herself.

“…I was scared.  The Staff told me it would protect me from anyone who was going to harm me.  It told me that it was going to destroy you.  That it was going to hurt you in a way so terrible, even _I_ wouldn’t realize it.”  She clenched her eyes shut, not even daring to glance in Tapp’s direction.  After going several tense seconds without any violent revenge, she peeked out the corner of her eye, and there was Tapp.  Still at work.  It was almost like he didn’t even hear her.  For a moment, she hoped he didn’t.

“If you aren’t going to take a weapon for yourself, at least acquire something that Lana could wield.  I recommend something in the realm of handguns, as it best complements Sheol’s melee capabilities without forcing unnatural shifts in armaments.”

A spark lit in Angel’s eyes, leaving her no choice but to grab Tapp by the shoulders and stare him in the eyes.  “ _Lana’s alive?!_ ”

After recovering from what must’ve been quite the shock, Tapp brushed off Angel’s grip and went back to his work, tampering with a device that had since taken the unmistakable shape of a rifle since Angel last paid attention to it.  “It is a possibility.  We’ll know for certain in due time.”

The spark of hope died a little in Angel’s eyes, but only a little.  After all, he didn’t say no.

“…Do you know where she is?”

“We’ll learn that for certain as well,” Tapp answered, raising the slender weapon that had just been fitted with a scope.  It looked like the same scope from his other gun.  Lana had previously told Angel about how Tapp re-used some parts between his different weapons.  If she were here now, then…

On second thought… _when_ they find her, she would ask.

Setting down a small handheld power tool, Tapp appeared to have finally completed his work.  His new rifle glistened like polished chrome.  It was shorter than Quicksilver ever was, and far more compact.  Based on what little Angel had picked up about guns from sheer exposure, it didn’t seem to have any ammunition ports, either input or output.  Sections of the rifle glowed white as it made a low, thrumming noise, barely audible.  Strangest of all, and this might have just been the Staff’s intuition, but it felt… bright.  And unmistakably powerful, in spite of its narrow frame.  Without even knowing much about this weapon, Angel knew in her gut that this was a weapon the likes of which the Infinity Bridge had never seen before.  …Or had it?

“Do you possess all the armaments you wish to carry?” Tapp asked.  “Anything you don’t claim, Euryale will.”

Angel cupped her hands around the thin air.  Even if it wasn’t immediately visible at the time, Angel knew that the Staff of Hosts would never abandon her.  “I have all I need,” she replied somewhat esoterically.

Tapp left the current work area and crossed the room to another table.  Unlike their former workspace, which had been cluttered with various technological… uh… whatchamacallits, this table was largely taken up by a long, rectangular suitcase.  One that was _certainly_ familiar, but not from any of their more recent escapades across the Bridge.  Tapp opened a series of fasteners and exposed the case’s contents, and Angel darted over to his side to see if she remembered correctly.

“Is that the… _positron cannon?_ ”

Satisfied with the sight of the behemoth of what Angel assumed was some kind of laser bazooka, Tapp nodded and shut the case.  “The Mk 1 positron cannon.  The working prototype, to be precise, though I wouldn’t expect you to remember _that_ much.”  Tapp slung the bulky case across his back with the aid of a long strap.

“Wait, Mk _1_?  You made more?”

Tapp returned to the first table, and Angel follows along like an eager kitten, as if Tapp was dragging an enticing strand of yarn behind him wherever he went.  From the first workspace, Tapp picked up his recently finished weapon.

“I _perfected_ it.  This weapon is the ripe fruit of years of design and rigorous efficiency testing.  Compact, stable, mechanically durable, and above all, _devastating_ to lycanthropes.  This is the Mk 3.15, the cutting edge in zero-drop electromagnetic radiation dispersion technology.”

Shocking Angel, Tapp draws the weapon across his lab and lines up his sights on the broken remains of the acclimation chamber he used on Euryale.  With a contempt he must’ve reserved for all his own inferior technology, Tapp pulled back the trigger, firing a dazzling ray of light at the large machine.  Upon connecting, and nearly instantaneously at that, the chamber exploded violently, launching flaming metallic debris across the lab in a move seeming awfully short-sighted and rash for someone like Tapp.  If it wasn’t for the Staff of Hosts, some of that debris would’ve hurtled straight back at the two of them, instead of being caught in mid-air as if by telekinesis.  And who knows what the explosive shockwave would’ve done to them…

Or maybe Tapp was just testing Angel’s reflexes.  Who could say?

“I call it… the Exorcist,” Tapp declared with a smug, satisfied smirk.

Angel recoiled a bit, only now realizing that the Staff of Hosts had materialized in her grasp.  Scraps of bent metal and glass dropped to the floor, having stopped only inches from her face.  She waited for her pulse to slow its thundering pace before responding.

“…Tapp…  That was _insane!_ ”

“I fail to see why,” Tapp responded.  “The icthyopod won’t need that device any longer, and neither will we.  Like I told you, once we leave this facility, we won’t be coming back again, permitting it to allocate the armaments within as it deems fit.  To do that, it ought to be acclimated to breathe oxygen as normal, enabling it to negotiate with survivors with a similar respiratory apparatus.  We have ensured that.”

“Y’know what?  I’m not even gonna’ _bother_ trying to correct your pronouns anymore,” Angel answers, still recovering from the shock.

Tapp had already started making his way for the door to the lab.  “At any rate, I have all that I need now.”

Tapp’s phrasing stuck with Angel for longer than the gunsmith likely intended.  Angel stared back at the debris of the destroyed chamber at the back of the lab.  The fires were already beginning to die down, but you’d figure there’s only so much that an aquarium can burn anyway.  Confident that the thing wouldn’t be hazardous to Euryale, Angel left the flaming wreck behind and followed Tapp to the doors.

“No you don’t.  But at least you’re on the right track.  Come on, let’s go and find Lana.”

Tapp paused and raised an eyebrow just long enough for Angel to leave the room before him.  Surprisingly, and somewhat amusingly, this wasn’t the first time today he found himself staring introspectively at a pair of swinging doors after being left alone in a room by an ally.  One door always slower than the other.

He made a mental note to fix that someday.  But for now, there was work to do.

*-*-*

Angel and Tapp gazed out over the wasteland before them.  As far forward as they could see, the land was a barren, deserted plane of earth, sitting perpetually under a starless abyss of a sky.

Tapp wasted no time in tracing Exorcist’s barrel along the horizon line.  The compact design made this considerably easier than his ultimately failed flirtations with ion weaponry.  The sheer volume of Quicksilver’s design that had been consumed by its coolant systems weren’t even able to maintain a sustained rate of fire without fusing the mag-rails.  Perhaps Exorcist would fare better, as positron payloads had both zero-drop and exothermal reaction upon impact, rather than within the firearm itself.  If he was wrong, there wouldn’t be much he could do about that anymore, now that his hand had been forced.

He had some choice words for Lana about that, assuming she was still alive.

With no motion detected via the scope’s HUD, Tapp’s eye fixated on a digital timer as it ticked off millisecond after millisecond.  He wagered that he’d have about twenty more seconds before being inundated by Angel’s constant questioning, and so he took the time to decide whether or not to answer her when-

“So what are we standing around here in the middle of nowhere for?”

Well, that was _considerably_ shorter than twenty seconds.

“I have a scout tracking Lana’s movements.  When we rendezvous, we’ll know where she went.”

“A scout?” Angel pestered.  “What, like some kind of robo-mechanical camera-bot or something?”

Tapp parted his gaze from Exorcist’s scope for just a second.  “No, I mean _an actual living creature!_ ” he answered rashly.  “…smart-ass…”

“So why did Lana wander off somewhere so dangerous anyway?  What did you do?”

Yap, yap, yap…  Tapp would rather take his chances among the lycanthropes at points such as this.  “What did _I_ do?  Lana is hot-headed, erratic and remarkably defiant.  What do you _think_ happened?”

“I think you may be thicker than you realize.”

Tapp grumbled to himself.  “You baselessly assign liability to me?  I am a leader of _warriors_.  What do you expect from me?  That I treat her like a _princess?!_ ” Tapp points out facetiously.

“If you did…” Angel began cautiously, staring down at the ground and folding her arms behind her back.  “…well… maybe she might respect you a little more.  After a while, then maybe… just maybe… she might treat _you…_ like a prince.”

As encouraging as Angel likely intended that disjointed, stuttering utterance to be, it took all of Tapp’s control to avoid a series of field-test exercises for Exorcist whilst employing Angel as a target.  After all, she knew about… _that_.  How else could she have freed the icthyopod?  Tapp’s trigger finger only found rest in the knowledge that he had not yet discovered the secrets to controlling the Staff of Hosts without Angel’s assistance, though that didn’t stop Exorcist’s barrel from finding its way to Angel’s nose, long before Tapp realized what he was doing.

“You’re out of line, Angel.  Make mention of that again, and I’ll scatter your ashes across the Maw of S’rraen.”  Tapp’s finger hovered over Exorcist’s trigger.  “One twitch.  Just _one… errant… twitch_ … and this war will no longer be your concern!  Give me an excuse, Angel, I _dare you!_ ”

… _SUBSTANCE DETECTED;_   _ANALYZING…_

_…ANALYZING…_

_…ANALYSIS COMPLETE;  COMPILING RESULTS…_

_COMPOSITION (IN ORDER OF GREATEST SATURATION):  DIHYDROUS MONOXIDE, SODIUM CHLORIDE (IONIZED)_

_REQUEST SATURATION BREAKDOWN?  (Y/N)_

  1.   That wouldn’t be necessary.  That breakdown query algorithm that Tapp had been experimenting with was already proving itself useful in expediting processor-squandering analyses such as this.  Even he recognized crying when he saw it.



When Lana was around, even as much of a pain as Angel was, and even as much as Lana admitted to this, she would still stick up for Angel when she cried, all while wondering quite publicly what kind of monster he was for supposedly causing such an infantile outburst, only to then question whose outburst was actually the more infantile, followed by an extended rant on being the sole proprietor of sanity on the Infinity Bridge, after which he would summarily ignore her until she settled down or made a relevant strategic observation.  He could almost hear Lana’s nagging in the back of his mind on account of the frequency with which he endured it in reality.  Even without that presence immediately about, he would still prove her wrong out of principle, and so he lowered Exorcist.

“I can see the pain you’re in, Tapp.  It’s a pain I can’t begin to imagine, and even if I _could_ imagine it, I wouldn’t want to.”

Thus, Tapp was compelled to ask the blindingly obvious.  “If I’m in as much pain as you say, what are _you_ crying for?  Why don’t you leave, too?  Just like Lana did.”

“Because of Rykelle.”

Tapp knew that it would come to this.  Such is the inevitable outcome when a secret-keeper meddles with the omniscient.

“What do you know about h-”  Tapp caught himself.  “…that word?”

“For right now, only that it meant something to you once.  I want to figure it out, though.”

“I thought the Staff of Hosts gave you omniscience.”

“But I don’t just want to _know_.  I want to hear it from _you_ ,” Angel insisted.

“Me?” Tapp asked, as if he had missed something.  “What’s so special about what I have to say?  You think you can trust me?  I was willing to kill you just moments ago, and you think that what I have to tell you would clear things up?”

“I think I can figure it out if you keep speaking in plain English like this.”

Tapp’s hand shot up over his mouth as a curse worthy of Lana herself rushed through his mind, and nearly escaped through his mouth.

“What I intend to inform is… the formation of my articulation is… of negligible efficacy… to the salience of your… dialect-obsessive… psycho-analytic…  …Shit.”

He should’ve known something was up when Angel was willingly letting him make a fool of himself.  Now, all that remains is to find the most graceful means of escaping the hole he had dug for himself.  (Excluding suicide by Exorcist, for obvious reasons.)

“What do you want?”

“I want to help you this time.”

Angel reached around behind him, and Tapp wasn’t certain as to her intent.  Glancing back, he could just barely catch a glimpse of Angel’s hand resting on the case that he kept his positron cannon in, still strapped across his back.  He thought that was it, but was all the more surprised when Angel threw her arms around his neck and leaned into him.

“I didn’t notice anything before.  When I saw what the Infinity Bridge was starting to become, I ran away.  From everything.  I didn’t even _think_ about what you were going through.  All I wanted was to get away.  Then the monsters came for me.  But you came back to stop them.  And when the Staff of Hosts appeared, it was like I was being given a second chance to help you.  To listen to what’s bothering you.  To _not_ be a coward this time.  And this time, I _promise_ I won’t let you down.”

The thought to hug Angel back didn’t even cross Tapp’s mind.  The thought to slam her into the dirt did, but pity took over… if for no other reason than to prove Lana wrong.

At the very least, Angel clearly meant well, even if she had no idea what she was talking about.  But even with the Staff of Hosts potentially telling her everything that was about to happen, even if Angel was just a simple question away from uncovering what he originally had planned for not just her, but Lana as well, would she really be this friendly?  Perhaps ignorance is bliss in this case, as Tapp strongly suspected that Lana realized what he had recruited her for, or that she at least had some faint idea.  Nevertheless, as ever, he would have to use Angel to his advantage.  Before it’s too late.

“You seek to provide aid to my cause?” Tapp inquired.

Angel pulled away from Tapp, revealing a disappointed look in her eyes.

“I counter your inquiry with a pact of assistance,” Tapp continued, gleefully spouting out complex vocabulary and, with mildly above-average allocations of fortune, crushing Angel’s very soul in the process, though he knew she would accept this.  If she wanted to satiate her curiosity, how could she refuse?

“…What is it?” Angel spat, though with the understanding that she couldn’t seriously refuse his offer, no matter what it was.  Just as he had planned.

Tapp took the opportunity to remove Angel’s weakened embrace.  “You must assist me with locating Voidwalker Lana.  After this point, if Lana has maintained her own survival, I will inform you both of my true goal, after which point both of you will assist me in said goal.  When all of that is done… you will know the answers to all your present questions.”

Angel’s eyes shot open at that last element of the verbal contract presented before her, immediately following up this expression with a bitter grimace.  And thus, she would learn what it means to be a ‘friend’ to, and ally of, Voidwalker Tapp…

“Do we have a deal?” he pressed.

“How could you do something like this?” Angel whimpered back.  “I’m trying to help you.  I _want_ to help you.  And yet you make it nearly impossible _on purpose!_   You’re not hurting anyone but yourself!  If you keep this up, all you’re gonna’ do is drive _everyone_ away from you, just like you drove Lana away!”

“ _Do we have a deal?!_ ” Tapp pressed once further, though slightly more aggressively than he cognitively intended.

“ _YOU ALREADY KNOW WE DO, DON’T YOU?!_ ” Angel yelled back with all the might she could muster.

Tapp smirked triumphantly.  Drilling the point home even further, he paced in a circle around Angel, ensuring that no detail slips even her remarkably thick grasp.  “You never had a choice in the matter.  Ever since Lana and I rescued you from that desert realm, you’ve insisted on following me across the Infinity Bridge.  And for what?  Since then, you’ve been a mere puppet on my strings.  So kind.  So sweet.  So _malleable_.  You knew that, in your heart of hearts, I was just using you for the power that the Staff of Hosts provided, and you _still_ followed my every command!”

“And what about Lana?  Was her running from your schemes as fast as she could part of your plan, too?  What happens to your master plan if _I_ decide I don’t want to go along with it?  What’re you gonna’ do _then_ , huh?”

Tapp turned his back to Angel, but not so much that she couldn’t hear his dull, maniacal cackle.  “How do you intend to defy my plans when you do not even know what they are?  For that matter, how do you know _Lana_ isn’t doing exactly what I want?  After all, it was a simple matter to manipulate her into slaying the progenitor:  simply allow her vindication and pointless sense of justice to simmer, then merely direct her at a target I want destroyed.  Returning her to the fold will be _even simpler_ by comparison.”

“Not if I warn her!” Angel responded thoughtlessly.  “I’ll keep following you.  I’ll tell Lana how you plan to manipulate her into fighting your battles for you.  What’re you gonna’ do _then?_ ”

“Ah, a strategy devised with all the brilliance that I’ve come to expect of _you_ ,” Tapp taunted with a damningly unenthusiastic applause.  “You want to follow me to wherever Lana took refuge, reveal to her that you still live, and thus compel her to rejoin our group for the purpose of protecting _you_.  Didn’t it occur to you that the only reason she left me was because she thought the progenitor had killed you?  Lana had known I was manipulating her for some time now, and would have deserted me long ago.  However, by the time she affirmed the intolerability of our alliance… _you_ came along, thus forcing her to continue following me out of fear for what a ruthless, violent mercenary like me might do to a defenseless, naïve girl like you if she refused.”  He then turns his head around and unleashes a coy smirk.  “Of course, if _you_ refuse to follow me… well, _who knows_ what I’ll do to Lana once I find her…”

“I’ll…  I’ll figure out what you’re really after, Tapp,” Angel attempted to threaten him, though clearly in no position to do so.  “And then, whatever it is you’re up to, I’ll _stop you!_ ”

“You can’t manipulate _me!_ ”

Angel held her hands over her mouth as a look of unmistakable terror took root in her eyes after hearing Tapp echo her last proclamation verbatim and in perfect synchronization.  She trembled ever so slightly in place.

Tapp answered Angel’s horror with a smug grin.  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re kinda’ cute when you’re paranoid?”

The once-weepy overly saccharine Angel became an unrecognizably spastic amalgamation of clenched teeth, balled up fists, pent up rage, and utter confusion, somewhere between the readiness to break down and cry and the readiness to beat him to death with the Staff of Hosts, as if that recourse would ever have crossed her mind without the consideration that he might have anticipated it.  At some point, the thought of bewildering a mind so simple almost struck Tapp as unfair.  Almost.

Tapp began his forward march, out into the darkness.  “It’s time we locate Lana.”  Before continuing, he turns his head back.  “ _Are you coming?_ ”

This time, Angel really _did_ break down and cry.  Good, Tapp assessed, turning completely away from the pitiable figure.  It appeared for a moment as if she was becoming enamored with him.  Had she continued, she might have even evoked… reciprocation.  Such a demeanor had to be neutralized, no matter the cost.

Immediately after this thought, Tapp felt struck in his stomach at the thought that he even considered his altogether necessary actions as any kind of cost at all.  He increased his pace, shouldering Exorcist from its taut-hanging strap.  However, as his pace increased, he noticed that his footsteps weren’t the only ones reverberating into the abyssal eternity.  He stopped and turned back.

Angel took a step back and raised the Staff of Hosts horizontally before her, hovering horizontally in the air just beyond her palm.  A literal line in the sand between the two.  Doubtless emboldened by an ethereal weapon without peer, she hadn’t even bothered to wipe the tears from her eyes.

“I… _I hate you_ ,” Angel sputtered, having come to terms with her defeat with all the dignity of a child that had just surmised that life simply isn’t fair.

Tapp had seen enough, and so he proceeded.  “Preserve that notion,” he warned.

*-*-*

“I take it that that’s gonna’ be mine?”

“Affirmative.”

“What is it?”

“A heavy-caliber minigun.  I’m retrofitting it for your personal use, as I was never able to solve the problem of how to stabilize a weapon of this size.  Your stature, on the other hand, would render any recoil negligible.  When ready, my modifications will enable it to fire rounds with a darkmatter payload.”

“The same material as lycanthrope hide?”

“Precisely.  With a fast rate of fire and a hyper-density payload on each round, the violent decompression upon impact should make a mockery of even the sturdiest lycanthrope flesh.”

“Hmm…  …”

“You seem particularly focused.”

“…Falchion.”

“…A sword?”

“No.  A name.  An acronym.  You techno-nerd types like acronyms, don’t you?”

“And what does it stand for?”

“Fast action, large-caliber, heavy-impact ordnance.”

“Fa…lc…hi…o…?  Though that name certainly has its elegance, where exactly are you deriving the ‘N’ from?”

“What?  There’s an ‘N’ in ‘ordnance’.”

“You can’t just arbitrarily use a letter from the middle of a word to complete an acronym!”

“Right.  Because I _always_ quake in fear for my life when somebody brandishes a _falchio_ at me.  It’s called literary license.  Either grin and go with it, or come up with a better name yourself.”

“Point taken… though that still doesn’t make it incredibly salient.”

“Hey, I _won_.  Don’t take that away from me.”

“Do you want the FALCHION or not?”

“Heh heh heh…”

*-*-*

He certainly _did_ want the FALCHION, Kurias recounted as the weapon blurted out a stream of destruction with a roar that even rivaled his own.  The horde of lycanthropes bearing down on his position found themselves violently disemboweled by the detonating blasts of each and every single round that left FALCHION’s rotary barrels to meet them in gruesome union.  Some of the creatures were blown in half.  Others were simply reduced to a crimson mist that blanketed their peers as they barreled forward, seemingly eager for their own portion of death.  And the god of their deaths would graciously provide for one and all.

Kurias let his hubris slack more and more as the horde continued its slavering approach.  They were hardly of the number that they were before, but their ranks were getting spaced out enough that it took more and more time to catch a single creature in one of FALCHION’s salvos.

_BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOP-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…_

_Augh!_   It seemed as if his fun with FALCHION had run short as the empty ammunition alarms blared directly into his right ear.  It would take him hours to regenerate the ammunition he spent in those brief few moments.  The volleys from FALCHION ceased, allowing the smoking barrels to keep spinning until they stopped naturally, though he was by no means defenseless in the meantime.  One particularly brazen hound was about to find this out the hard way.

Kurias’ metallic claw caught the lycanthrope as it leapt for him, after which he drove the creature’s impaled, broken body into the ground.  He caught the smell of its freshly-spilt blood on the air, riling his primal thirst.  It squealed as Kurias leaned his opposite foreclaw into the creature’s neck, crushing its bones and ending its misery.

Sometimes, being one of _them_ had its advantages.

Kurias bore his teeth at the remnants of the lycanthrope pack.  Less than a dozen.  He didn’t even _need_ FALCHION to take on a cluster that size.  In their own primitive way, they knew it too.  Their frantic dashing slowed to a nervous trot.  With a triumphant roar from Kurias, even that slow advance came to a full stop.  Led by those trailing along the rear, they began circling away, turning their ravenous stampede into a full rout.  He could have chased them.  It was certainly in his own tainted blood at this point to do so.  And they certainly deserved it.  Z’vaot alone knew how many sins these particular beasts had wrought.  He might have even caught them, poetically using their own curse against them… but he was _not_ one of them.  And he would be damned before he was.

Besides, Tapp would probably be wanting that report.  The very report whose collection wound up getting him into this ambush in the first place.  And the sooner Tapp got that report… the sooner Kurias could exchange words with that supposed survivor Tapp found.

The broken lycanthrope’s blood splashed across his teeth as he tore into the abomination with his jaws.  Burying his snout in its torso, he found his… daily sustenance.

*-*-*

Euryale’s eyes glistened curiously in the light of the bizarre, alchemical energy before her.  Lifting her palms nearer to it, the closest sensation she had ever known was like that of approaching the sun-warmed tropical waters near the surface, though with an intensity like that of a deep-sea subterranean vent.  Though it strained her comfort to do so, she knelt low before the light and exposed her palms to its warmth, as it was the starkest contrast to the frigid, arid cove that she had been so graciously given as her own.  At least it _smelled_ like home.

Aside from the light, her only refuge from the cold was a coarse white sheet which her fellow mermaid had wrapped around her bare skin, as if compelled to conceal some taboo.  It made Euryale wonder how long Voidwalker Angel had been out of the ocean, all while loosening the cloth to expose her bare torso to the warming light.  Taboo or not, who was around to see her?  As for Angel’s… er… friend?  Was that too strong a word?  She saw that fear in Angel’s eyes, as clear from her expression as from the most natural water-breather.  Well whoever the male was, he seemed to take it at a given that someone responsible ought to watch over this area, looking after the clutter and toys that he charitably called weapons, even though not one of them looked even _remotely_ aquadynamic…

She almost felt bad for the voidwalkers’ clear sacrifice that she couldn’t properly appreciate their charity.  Then again, were it not for the Leviathan, a whole sea would’ve been hers to command.  Even if fate would rather she dwell above the surface, it was still basically the same thing.  Perhaps a little less grand, not having seen what the world outside this geometrically-hewn cavern looked like, but similar.  Someone would always count on her for something so grandiose and important that it defied her wildest imaginations, wouldn’t they?  Ever since donning the Coral Emblem, it was like the entire ocean expected her to deliver the Sky and Sea.  _Of course_ she could breathe air and save the depths at the same time!  Was there anything the almighty and ever-gracious High Princess Euryale couldn’t do?

She spat bubbles at the thought… or she would have if she were still underwater.  Instead it came out backwards:  a spurt of water escaping her mouth into the air.  This air-breathing thing was going to take some getting used to.  And she would have to get used to it fast.

If her fellow mermaid was right, the sharks were all over the place.  How was she supposed to fight them, anyway?  Come to think of it, how could a shark move on land?  The sharks probably had legs in this environment, probably not too unlike the legs she knelt upon at this very moment.  This was all well and good, but how were you supposed to harpoon them in the absence of water?  One would need massively-strong arm muscles to propel a harpoon through _air_ without it falling off-target.   Maybe the sharks were a lot clumsier on land, falling all over the place as their legs lost strength and they hit the ground due to gravity, or something like that.  All she knew about air-breather combat came from what she saw watching Angel fight the male.  They probably had their own traditions, styles, and technology for it, altogether alien to the water-breather way of things.  Looking around and finding herself in the workshop of an air-breather, she pondered on how such technology might work.

*-*-*

_Time to prove your worth, Sakurai…_

Keiko took in a deep breath, getting a taste larger than any she wanted of that foul, cadaverous stench hanging in the dank air.  She readied her pistols, one in each hand, as she rests her back against the wall of the lightless corridor.  Data scrolls raced across her moss-tinted goggles, and she tracked their readouts as best as she could.  With her HUD checked, she gently reached her right arm to the door and shoved it inwards, just enough to squeeze through the doors without making a sound.  Slipping between the doors, she kept low, hiding behind waist-high tables and cabinets nearest to the doors.  It took a bit of a rolling leap to get there, but she was able to avoid making a racket by keeping her weapons or belt supplies from hitting the ground.  Her goggles gave her a readout of her pulse and, seeing it so high, she urgently began pacing a series of long, steady nasal breaths, struggling to avoid vomiting at the smell.

*-*-*

Euryale felt a mild chill up her bare back as the bright energy rose up, breaking its chaotic fluctuations and swelling up for a split second before subsiding.

“Hmm…”

*-*-*

The cabinets cast long, flickering shadows against the walls.  She could hear the crackle of a roaring fire at the back of the room, which only served to make that awful smell all the worse.  It was so potent at this time that it almost distracted her as to what a fire was doing in what she thought was the lab of this place.  Was it some kind of gas fire?  Did she pull some kind of super-idiotic move and dive into the wrong room?

A tap on the side of her goggles called up a rough 3-dimensional outline of the premise on the surface of the lenses.  A small green dot appeared near the door of one of the lower rooms, immediately at the base of a stairwell, indicating her present location.  Well, never hurts to double-check, especially when you’re trying to show off.  Better than attempting to show off and proceeding to make an ass of one’s self… again.

The shadow of a feminine figure emerged on the far wall, cast by the flickering fire at the back of the room.  Keiko froze up and held her breath at the movement from the figure.  The shadow turned her head from one direction to the other, slowly scanning the room.

*-*-*

“He-  Hel-  Hello?” Euryale called, her voice cracking in the air.  “Angel?  Is that you?”

Not hearing anyone respond, she figured that her jittery mind was just playing tricks on her.  Near-death experiences probably had that effect.  Ultimately, she decided to just sit back down and warm herself by the fire, putting the fear of an intruder out of her mind altogether.

*-*-*

“ _Angel…?_ ” Keiko silently mouthed.  Was this place and all its fancy weapons technology _really_ built by someone with such a stupid, dainty-sounding name?  She was… well, kinda’… tired during the briefings, but even she thought that this place was watched over by some guy calling himself Voidwalker… uh… T-something.  Ttttt…ttttrip?  Voidwalker Tripp?  No, that didn’t sound right…

Whoever it was, it certainly wasn’t that kinda’ hoarse-sounding little girl in the room with her now.  Somehow, she always imagined him with some deep, smooth, respectful baritone.  Commanding, yet gentle.  Firm, yet kind… and…

NO!  FOCUS, KEIKO!  This is the kind of crap that Captain Ark keeps you out of all the really important missions for!  Complete.  The.  Mission!

As if to reinforce her own self-discipline, Keiko heard a fuzzy crackling in her ear, followed by another voice, mixed in with some mild radio interference for flavor.

“Private Sakurai, report:  have you engaged the target?  Repeat:  have you engaged the target?  Over.”

Keiko sighed.  One target.  She’d have to be counting on that.  If Voidwalker Tope was hiding somewhere around here, waiting in ambush to catch the raiders who have been pilfering his tech for months now, she wouldn’t live long enough to make it outta’ here anyway.  Sheepishly, she brought her voice down to the lowest whisper she could.

“One target.  Non-voidwalker.  Engaging.”

_”Do you have confirmation that your target isn’t a voidwalker?”_

Pfft, no.  Who’s got the time to mess around with a thorough hadron scanning at a time like this?

_”Do you have confirmation on that ID?  Private Sakurai, come in!  Come in!  Private Sakurai!  …Keiko!”_

Keiko had already checked her weapons by the time the admonishing voice on the other end of the comm was getting too insistent.  She flipped it off with a casual whisk across the back of her ear, confident that she’d have good news to report very, very soon.

*-*-*

How do air-breathers actually see anything?  You can barely feel any movement around you in the air.  These were Euryale’s thoughts as she felt the touch of cold metal against the side of her head.

“Don’t move a muscle.”

“What an odd thing to say.  How am I supposed to breathe if I can’t move?  Or is that another of your air-breather euphemisms?”

For her questioning, she felt the metal pressed against her head nudge at her.

“You know what I meant, smart-ass!  Eyes forward.  Put your hands on your head.  Stand up.  _Slowly._ ”

“So, can I move and do that, then?  Or should I keep still?”

Euryale was getting pretty annoyed with her supposed attacker’s contradicting instructions, and to make matters worse, her attacker clubbed her in the back of the head with something heavy and solid.

“ _Ow!_  Okay, okay, fine!”  Euryale wrapped her hands around behind her head, where she had been hit.

“Good, now get up.”

Why couldn’t her attacker just say ‘put your hands behind your head’ like a normal person would?  ‘Hands on your head’ could’ve very well meant anything that even remotely ended with one’s hands somewhere on one’s head, and Euryale was just lucky enough to stumble onto the appropriate gesture that her attacker was looking for.  Keeping up with her attacker’s instructions, Euryale kept her hands behind her head and stood up, allowing the cloth wrapped around her to slide off and hit the floor.  No sooner did she do that did her attacker reach down and scoop up that cloth, holding it up in front of her.

“ _And for the love of God, put some clothes on!_ ” her attacker added, though a lot more nervous and flustered than before.

Between Angel and her attacker, Euryale concluded that there must’ve been some air-breather taboo against revealing bare flesh.  She may not have known what ‘clothes’ were (perhaps a plural of ‘cloth’, though she only had the one), but she wasn’t about to take another hit to the back of the head again and simply threw the sheet around herself.  She just hoped that this wouldn’t earn her another bludgeoning for taking her hands off the back of her head.

“Where are the voidwalkers?  Why aren’t they here?” Euryale’s attacker barked at her.  She could hear a soft clicking sound very near to her ear, a very odd way of making a threat as she probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it from across a room, and certainly not through the air, but her attacker could have whatever authority she wanted at this point.

“Now where is Voidwalker Trope?  When is he coming back?”

“Voidwalker _Trope?_ ” Euryale repeated uncertainly.  It sounded like that name Angel mentioned:  the name of her supposed ally.  “I… I know of a Voidwalker _Tapp_.  Is that who you’re looking for?”

“Uh… yeah, Tapp!  That was my next guess!”

“And who are you?”

“You don’t need to know that!  Where is Voidwalker, uh… Voidwalker Tapp, and when is he coming back?”

“Are you one of his allies?”

Euryale’s purposefully unidentified attacker chortled loudly at the notion.  “An _ally?_   To a _voidwalker?_   Don’t make me laugh!  Voidwalkers don’t haveallies.  They have _slaves,_ the decadent scum.”

This actually explained quite a lot, particularly Angel’s reaction.  If her attacker was right, voidwalkers don’t even seem to have allies amongst each other.

…Wait a second, is this why he was so willing to give away his lab to a veritable stranger?  Was he expecting this person?  Did Tapp set her up?

“What do you want?” Euryale asked nervously, praying all the while that she could reach a diplomatic compromise with these pirates.

“I’ll ask the questions around here, scrawny little shrimp!  How did you get in here?  Do you have any idea how rough the security on this place is to get through?!”

A security system… wait, the key-card!

“If you’re worried that he might come back, you don’t have to.  Voidwalker Tapp gave me something called a ‘key card’, and then left me here.  He said he wouldn’t be coming back, and that everything in here was mine.”

“ _Bullshit!_ ”

“It’s true!” Euryale insists, quickly turning around.

She wasn’t about to be intimidated.  Remembering who she was, remembering what she had been through, and remembering the responsibility and dignity that had been entrusted to her by air and sea alike, she turned to face her attacker, allowing the sheet around her to fall at her feet.

“I am High Princess Raidne Euryale, Spawn of Charybdis and Crowned Empress of Many Depths.  I am the last survivor of my undersea kindred, displaced from the home of my birth by the Paracanis Carcharodon forces of the recently-deceased Leviathan.  Having been bestowed this cove by the authority of Voidwalker Tapp and Voidwalker Angel, and by the authority of my birthright, I hereby decree this place under my royal protection!  Leave this territory peacefully, and you have my word that you will not be pursued beyond its reaches.”

Euryale found herself matching gazes with a girl with messy coral hair and green lenses fastened over her eyes by a bulky apparatus.  Were it not for her two blocky short clubs pointed aggressively at her, Euryale would find it very difficult to take such a youth seriously.  But Euryale meant that whole elaborate, long-winded speech.  She was born to give them.  And, given the emerging red tint in her attacker’s cheeks, maybe she was actually really good at it.

Instead of turning and running, the girl set her weapons down and scrambled to Euryale’s feet.  She thought that speech was good, but not enough to get her attacker to suddenly _bow_.  But it didn’t matter, as the other girl was up to her feet with the cloth that Euryale had just discarded.

“Alright, alright, I get it!  Geez, it’s one thing to make it clear that you’re not concealing a weapon, but you don’t need to _flash your boobs_ to get that across…” she fussed.  She threw the cloth over Euryale’s torso, wrapping it under her arms and then darting around behind her to fasten it with some folding or knotting technique.  Euryale just kept her eyes forward and sighed.  After all, it’s the duty of royalty to learn the cultures of others.

“Sheesh, even if you’re _not_ a princess, it’s still improper for a girl to walk around _buck-freaking-naked_.  What if my C.O. sees you like this?”

At this point, Euryale figured that it was alright to just go along with it.  Anyone violent enough to be a threat probably wouldn’t care too much about exposure taboos.  Voidwalker Tapp didn’t care much, and he and Angel came to blows.

Once the girl was done fixing the cloth to her, she wandered back to the center of the room, where she dropped her weapons.  After brushing the back of her ear, she began talking to herself in a bold, clear voice.  Euryale could even hear her without being underwater.  But who was she talking to?

“All units, come in, this is Private Sakurai.  Over…  …That’s not importa-  ugh, _affirmative_ Captain, I’ve cleared the facility.  Voidwalker Terp isn’t here…  Sir, repeat?  …Tapp, yeah, yeah, whatever, that’s not really important right now.  I found someone else in here, and I have her in custody, but… well, you should probably come down here.”

And at this point in her recounting, the girl self-identifying as ‘Private Sakurai’ turned back and stared at Euryale.  She raised her goggles and gave the barely-clothed princess a look of blank uncertainty.

“I don’t think you’ll believe it if you don’t see it for yourself.  Over and out.”


End file.
